A Camera For The Car

A Picture from the camera mounted in the car

A Picture from the camera mounted in the car

I received a Countour HD Camera as a Christmas gift, which is just about the perfect thing to receive, aside from cool car parts ;-) It’s basically like other semi-ruggedized cameras in that it has an aluminum case and meant to stand up to some abuse. This sort of thing would be perfect for, say, a drag car. Because of their size, they’re not created to produce the best images in the world because of the lack of optics on the thing.

Even still, It should give me a great reference to check out my driving, consistency, track conditions and even a rough idea of engine RPM and boost levels. This will be a really good tool for me to be able to use for my own purposes. And, of course, it gives me a way to let other people ride in the car, even if they can’t actually experience every sense of what it’s like. If you really want to know what it’s like, you’ll have to build your own ;-)

The ContourHD Mounted to my roll cage

The ContourHD Mounted to my roll cage

I think I spent about 20 minutes on the mount for the camera. the camera itself comes with a flat-surface mount, is essentially foam-rubber and apparently designed to dampen vibration. I have no flat surfaces in the center of the car with which to mount it, so I whipped up something quickly. After all, it really didn’t make sense to make it all that complicated. I had some stock .125″ 6061 aluminum laying around and ordered up a vibration-dampening pipe clamp from McMaster-Carr (one of my favorite places to shop, since they carry almost everything) that was the appropriate ID of my roll cage tubing. Then, I drilled a few holes in the 6061 plate, put a few rivet-nuts in the vibration-dampening clamp and bolted the whole setup to my roll cage. Now, until I get the car running and tuned and on the track I will have no idea how well this will actually work, but time will tell. I’ll let you see the results. I’m hoping it will be okay.