Tripod collar shoe for Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary telephoto lens

thingiverse

This tripod collar shoe is specifically designed for the Sigma super-telephoto lens, 150 to 600mm contemporary. The lens excels, but the tripod collar harbors several design flaws. Specifically: 1. The collar foot is too short and positioned too close to the lens body, rendering handholding difficult and practically impossible to adjust focus while handholding; 2. Balancing the lens on a gimbal head proves particularly challenging, especially when fully extended; 3. There's only one D-ring screw hole, allowing the lens to wobble on the arca-swiss plate, which in turn causes the screw to loosen. My design introduces two side walls to prevent the lens from wobbling on the tripod head and adds length and thickness to the collar foot for enhanced handholding capabilities. The shoe itself is an arca-swiss plate featuring two screw threads at the bottom for mounting on a longer arca-swiss plate or a telescope dovetail plate for astrophotography. This design necessitates one standard D-ring screw and two 1/4-20 threaded heat-set inserts. Note that arca-swiss plates typically boast two studs or nuts at the bottom to prevent the lens from sliding off in case the lock becomes loose. Since this design allows mounting on another plate, it omits these studs at the bottom. This shoe locks securely, especially on gimbal heads with a longer clamp; however, exercising caution is advisable when using this shoe. I'm excited about this design and would appreciate your thoughts!