Binocular Mount

(Parallelogram Style)

(Click for larger image)

I bought my brother a nice pair of Pentax binocs Christmas of '05 and he's been enjoying them a lot. But they're heavy and one's arms do get pretty tired after holding them up, so we thought about ways of "mounting" them. After searching the internet, we came up with this. I had some Mahogany lying around and we sliced it up on the table saw and band saw and pieced this together. The binocs in this image are my old 7x35's that I've had since I was 8 or 10 years old. I'll be breaking this down and shipping it to Texas this week, but wanted to shoot some images and post them. Perhaps someone out there can glean from our wanderings while building this contraption. If you use binocs, you should build one of these. They're simple to build AND they will DRAMATICALLY improve your binocular viewing sessions!

There are LOTS of websites with mounts based on this design; I take no credit for any of the design:

We got some ideas from Jan van Gastels' page. (Since Mahogany was available and free, we opted to use that instead of the lighter and more expensive aluminum.)

And we got other ideas from a couple of other sites:

http://www.astro-tom.com/projects/binocular_mount.htm'

http://www.benjaminsweb.com/TandT/

...and if you want to go all the way and build a chair with go-to function, check this out!: http://spacsun.rice.edu/~has/Atm.html

We opted to make ours with shorter segments so that it could be easily broken down, shipped and/or packed up for travel.

Here are scans of the plans and instructions for assembly:

 And here are some images from different angles and closeups. I mounted it to a retired tripod from my son's Meade 4.5" Equatorial mount. I bought an aluminum camera tripod off Ebay. The tripod is too flimsy for this binoc mount, but the pan head is particularly useful when mounted to the end of the parallelogram. It gives you all sorts of freedom to aim and adjust the binocular position. It's mounted on a tongue of wood that allows for free rotation of the tilt/pan handle (you can see the pan handle below in the third image from the left--it is black with a red center.)

I chose to mount the counterweight below the line of site on the mount. It wasn't necessary; I just liked it better when less obtrusive. That comes in handy for viewing while sitting or when going from grown-up heights down to youngun' heights.