CAGE for Panna GH2

My thoughts on the indiesystems cage....from a post I made elsewhere.....

My thoughts on the indiesystems cage....from a post I made elsewhere.....

It was like Christmas here last week. Cinematics matte box showed up and about an hour later the cage and rods from indie system. Cage is well built.....nice and solid. Lots of places to mount stuff. Perfect size for the GH2 I think. The cage and rods had a small bag with 2 allen wrenches and the top bolt. Nothing else. Turns out there should have been more in it, at the very least a bolt to attach the camera. No big deal....I picked one up at the local hardware store....(hell....I've mailed out a dvd to a customer and forgot to burn the video file on the disc!!)
You have to take the cage off of the rods to mount(or un-mount) the camera. Again not a major deal.....and I don't know if you would have to do so with other rod systems.
First thing I noticed when I mounted the camera is that without any type of soft material...ie cork or something....the camera will spin on the cage if pushed even gently on either side (red arrows). I tightened the bolt as much as I dared to without breaking anything and it still spins fairly easy. This is a big problem initially....though I plan to find something to put between the camera and cage to stop this. Second thing....and even more alarming was that as I put on and tightened the top bolt (green arrow)
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I actually saw the top of the camera start to stretch up.....the top of the camera was moving up while the bottom stayed nice and tight on the cage. If I had not been going slow and paying attention I'll bet I would have pulled the camera apart or broken something. I'll need to go back to the hardware store and find some kind of spacer to fit in here. Someone asked about a stack of washers on the bolt in a picture on the original Shrigg Jig post. Something in here is a MUST!!
Last is just a pet peeve of mine. The way the mount to the tripod is set up makes it impossible to balance on the tripod with a big lens and mattebox without hanging the whole thing way off the back of the tripod. In the side view
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you can see just how far back it is and it still needs to go back some more to balance. Shrigg mentioned that indiesystems makes a long plate so you can achieve balance....but you would still have to hang it off the back.
So with a few minor mods.....I think the cage is a winner overall. I think I'm going to try a different rod system as I've noticed there are some that the mount is more forward than this one which should make balancing better. This is just a fault of the rod system, not the cage.
Since I posted this elsewhere....I've put a rubber coating on the bottom of the cage to prevent the camera from spinning on it. It's some stuff I got from Lowes years ago that you use to coat tool handles. Brushed on nice and thin and the camera is now quite steady. Also added some rubber washers to the top bolt.
 
Don't overtighten the hotshoe union bolt. It should be just tight enough to stabilize everything. When lens/mattebox is in place the body is twist-resistant, I use no rubber or anything under my body and it's stable. One idea would to be to put a layer of rug "gripper" under the camera body if you need additional grip.
 
Has anyone actually ordered the rewo cage? I ordered one on 10/11/11, but I still have not received it. I wrote multiple emails to them, with no responses.
 
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