Are you a dreamer or a builder? This is a question all aspiring brands and companies have to answer. One cannot succeed without the other. This dream belonged to a customer and we wanted to help bring it to life. We found a builder and we tasked them with two design goals: smaller and lighter. Luckily, we had a 3-D printed prototype ready with measurements and weight goals we were looking for. Here are the changes we’ve made to the original design.
We cut all the fat. Any possible place where we could cut weight without sacrificing the integrity of the supporting structures, we took it away. We achieved ultralight perfection. There was only one problem. The thumb screw was too big and heavy. The engineer estimated the weight and put it above our 1 ounce target. They asked us for any ideas and I was stumped at first. I took a closer look at the drawing and saw that the original design utilized a 1/4″-20 standard for the thumb screw. I remembered that our prototype used a smaller M4 screw! We messaged them our idea and they were able to incorporate that change. This put us under the 1 ounce target and allowed the use of a smaller thumb screw knob with an extremely low profile. Our overall length goal was 63mm and we kept the same 24-25mm width from the original design. With all the thinking done, it’s time for the custom sample to be made! A few days later the rep sent us these photos.
It looks amazing! So shiny and ultralight. I was admiring this tiny thing like it was some newborn puppy. This is just before the black finish in its raw aluminum form. You can see there was a drastic design change for the mini plate. Can you guess what for? Well if you’ve been following along you’d know that the customer that inspired this project was using a Peak Design Capture Clip for his camera while backpacking. The plate that comes with the reference arca-swiss plate is useless in this scenario and we saw it being basically useless. So I decided to make it capture clip compatible! I still recommend using the original design plate as the mini plate will have some “play” in the clip due to its smaller 25mm footprint. However, I did not want to ignore the original ultralight ethos this brand is about. We made an ultralight version available for the customer that are counting the grams! We have to wait another week before the sample arrives at my doorstep to play with it. Stay tuned for the final piece to this series. Happy trails.