Motorized Turntable for Tabletop Shooting?
 

Hi all:

We have been renting one called the Rev-Pod but it is unreliable, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt and they are no longer made. Does anybody have any suggestions on where to buy or rent a motrorized turntable in LA? Need variable speed, heavy duty for heavier objects as well as lighter.

Any advice appreciated.

Dan

I had a machinist make one for a few hundred dollars. Noisy as h**, but only used it for silent product shots. Long gone...

Maybe cobble something together from the guts of a microwave oven turntable motor and drive. This would only be single speed unless you could provide varying frequency 115VAC to the turntable motor.

A variation on this would be the guts out of an infrared chook cooker or kebab cooker, the kebab cooker drive preferred of all these as there is the least hardware to pull off the outside of it.

An automotive windscreen wiper motor would give you the gearing and a DC controllable motor.

Another option might be the guts of a rotating sign or a powered revolving door system.

For small objects, I built a turntable based on a geared LEGO motor. The design is from a VR turntable design by Philippe Hurbain. See this page:
http://www.philohome.com/turntable/turntable.htm
I found the slow speed very suitable for small product videography.

I recently found a more powerful design, and a great tutorial, at Digital Juice.
It's based on a rotisserie motor available at home improvement stores.
Here's the link: http://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/search.asp (then search for turntable).

Hope that helps.

Ken

Yeah Ken, you beat me to it. That's the one I was going to suggest. Simple but elegant. And not very expensive to implement.

-gb-