Film fit camera grips

Background: Some of my friends had been getting into 35mm film photography a few years back. On occasion, I'd try out some of these older cameras and think to myself "man this is so awkward to hold". Back then, camera manufacturers had great pride in creating smaller and smaller cameras, which often meant no hand grip as most modern cameras have. Doing some digging online, quite a number of people had similar complaints. Funnily enough, even some newer (digital) cameras have a skeuomorphic design which has almost no hand grip geometry, producing similar less-than-ideal ergonomics.

There were a couple people who had added on some form of 3D printed plastic grip, and I'd even printed one for my friend to use. These plastic grips were flimsy, ugly, and frankly; these marvels of engineering (film cameras) deserved better. I sought out to create a more polished, robust solution to this problem, and thus became 'FilmFit'.

Funnily enough, even some newer (digital) cameras have a skeuomorphic design which has almost no hand grip geometry, producing similar less-than-ideal ergonomics.

Because these cameras are more common than their vintage predecessors, there are add-on grips available for most of these newer cameras.

Nikon Zfc Digital Camera

FujiFilm X-E4 Digital Camera

I start out by making a couple prototype proof of concepts and lent them to my friends to try out. Overall, they felt very nice while shooting, and definitely added some flair to each camera.

Selling the solution

Truth be told, this wasn't a 'eureka' moment where I stumbled upon this problem that needed to be solved. This began shortly after building my first CNC mill, and realizing that I should probably find a way to commission it for practical purposes, both to make myself feel better about it not sitting idle, and to help cover the costs of it.

There were many other aspects/experiences I was looking to get out of doing something like this such as:

Learning some of the basics, challenges, and boring parts of a sole proprietorship
Getting hands on experience with manufacturing
Tackling the product development cycle with my own resources at a small scale where its still kind of fun

To keep this fairly short I:

Followed the generic Shopify path most small business owners involved in E-commerce do
Established a bit of branding where possible
Figured out an affordable shipping solution for orders shipping worldwide
Designed a variety of camera grips for numerous film cameras, reverse engineering the camera bodies themselves and proving out the design in one-off prototypes
Made a first small batch of camera grips for the Nikon 'FM' models of film camera, and sold out almost immediately
Made subsequent batches of camera grips for several other cameras made by Canon, Nikon, and Pentax

Manufacturing

For my first batch, I had started off milling rectangular bar stock. This was an incredibly slow process since my mill only had about 1kw of power and the strange shape/design of each grip base meant that lots of material had to be removed. Without a proper flood cooling setup, I also struggled constantly with chip welding and my supervision was required to keep chips from accumulating anywhere.

Making the wooden grips was much easier, since I was able to run many of these in one fixturing setup/operation with the larger travels of my CNC router and had even automated parting off each finished grip when the program finished. Manual post processing of the grips was still a bit of a nuisance, however. I would often consider plastics or other materials as a replacement for these wooden grips, but it's hard to deny the aesthetics of wooden trim on appropriate vintage items.

The next batches of camera grip bases were made from laser cut aluminum blanks. To make fixturing and order simpler, one blank design was used for several different camera grip models. I was now churning these out at a respectable pace.

Outcomes & conclusions

It was an overall success, although I ultimately ended up halting this and closed the store. There were a couple reasons for this:

I was residing in Waterloo, ON for work, and running this operation out of my family home closer to Toronto. This meant a lot of driving, and the ability to only produce parts on weekends. Since I'd give myself a target number of units to manufacture in a given weekend, this got really exhausting really fast. I'd considered looking for a small shop space nearby but didn't want to commit to this much workload during while working full time.
The market for this was not quite as large as I'd expected, and I had little to no skills in regards to marketing. In hindsight, this is something that could have been more apparent at the start, but of course recognizing confirmation bias is easier said than done.
I quickly realized that doing machine shop things is not as glamorous as it looks to be. Once a design and subsequent fixturing, manufacturing steps were all proven out and mostly optimized, its quite mind numbingly boring to stare at a CNC machine doing its thing for 12 hours straight (wow, big surprise, right).
To resolve my two complaints mentioned above, I would logically move to having these made by an outside manufacturer - this wouldn't be very fun either.

Overall, it was a pretty cool learning experience mostly in regards to gaining a new respect for the small nuances of anything related to retailing and small scale manufacturing. In the end, my CNC mill had well paid it self off meaning I'd be able to justify building another...

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