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 is great, but the tripod collar has several design flaws, namely--- 1. the collar foot is too short and too close to the lens body, making it hard to handhold and practically impossible to adjust focus while handholding; 2. it is impossible to balance the lens on the gimbal head, especially when fully extended; 3. there is only one D-ring screw hole, which allows the lens to wiggle on the arca-swiss plate, which in turn causes the screw to loosen. My design has two walls on the side to prevent the lens from wiggling on the tripod head, and it adds some length and thickness to the collar foot to facilitate handholding. The shoe is a arca-swiss plate itself and has two screw threads on the bottom so it can be mounted on a longer arca-swiss plate for better balancing or on a telescope dovetail plate for astrophotography. This design requires one standard D-ring screw and two 1/4-20 threaded heat-set inserts. Note that arca-swiss plates typically have two studs or nuts at the bottom to prevent the lens from sliding off in case the lock becomes loose. Because this design has the option to be mounted on another plate, it does not have the studs at the bottom. This shoe locks pretty tight, especially on gimbal heads that have a longer clamp, but do exercise precaution in this respect when using this shoe. Hope you like this design and let me know what you think!