ARCHIVE Owl Expedition Media Mount (3 Viewers)

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Hi all, well I finally got my new old LX470 (2001/39K miles from Japan) back from the garage and I started playing the the tinkertoy, er... Smallrig 15mm rod components. I've tentatively settled on this layout:
full

The nice thing about this system is that you can arbitrarily position things in X-Y space, with lots of flexibilty around the vertical pivot and a bit around the horizontal pivot. So I could position my phone pretty high up near my eyeline for maps and not block the all-important (here in Dubai) aircon vent. Sorry for the poor photo-was holding with one hand and taking photo in the other in a pretty dark garage.

Here's a better picture of the setup:
full

And from the back:
full

I am not going to cut any more rods to length until I actually get the hardpoint installed and can really fiddle with the placement and see if I need to push things further out from the console. It feels pretty rigid. And assuming Owl's the hard point attachments are up to it, I think this should work out ok.

BTW, I didn't quite get the right set of joints for this setup. If you look at the phone you will see it actually has two places to insert rods. I've been thinking of putting in a dashcam, and short vertical rod would be a good place to semi-permanently mount a small dashcam.

Hope to do it all this weekend. I brought back a USA SPEC BT45-TOY Bluetooth module and CAS-LEX cable that purportedly clips in between the cassette deck and the wiring harness to add bluetooth etc. So with a little luck I will have some reasonable functionality. It's a little odd looking to some I am sure, but the semi-matte black and the ability to place the tubes over black areas of the console make it a little less obtrusive, and importantly, none of the important controls are rendered unreachable. Maybe the radio tuning will be a little annoying but I don't listen to the local radio anyways. Wish me luck with this!
 
John Young said:
Hi all, well I finally got my new old LX470 (2001/39K miles from Japan) back from the garage and I started playing the the tinkertoy, er... Smallrig 15mm rod components. I've tentatively settled on this layout:
full

The nice thing about this system is that you can arbitrarily position things in X-Y space, with lots of flexibilty around the vertical pivot and a bit around the horizontal pivot. So I could position my phone pretty high up near my eyeline for maps and not block the all-important (here in Dubai) aircon vent. Sorry for the poor photo-was holding with one hand and taking photo in the other in a pretty dark garage.

Here's a better picture of the setup:
full

And from the back:
full

I am not going to cut any more rods to length until I actually get the hardpoint installed and can really fiddle with the placement and see if I need to push things further out from the console. It feels pretty rigid. And assuming Owl's the hard point attachments are up to it, I think this should work out ok.

BTW, I didn't quite get the right set of joints for this setup. If you look at the phone you will see it actually has two places to insert rods. I've been thinking of putting in a dashcam, and short vertical rod would be a good place to semi-permanently mount a small dashcam.

Hope to do it all this weekend. I brought back a USA SPEC BT45-TOY Bluetooth module and CAS-LEX cable that purportedly clips in between the cassette deck and the wiring harness to add bluetooth etc. So with a little luck I will have some reasonable functionality. It's a little odd looking to some I am sure, but the semi-matte black and the ability to place the tubes over black areas of the console make it a little less obtrusive, and importantly, none of the important controls are rendered unreachable. Maybe the radio tuning will be a little annoying but I don't listen to the local radio anyways. Wish me luck with this!
Click to expand...
Hopefully the piece that attaches to the tongue clears the rest of the tape deck. The tongue only sticks out so far as to be as sturdy and clean as possible. I'll be curious to see how this works out for you.
 
I'm a goober for not reading the thread carefully before buying. I didn't realize it was for nav models only and does not fit non-nav models. I disassembled the entire radio down to the tape deck to discover that the tape deck on non-nav models is totally different. Oh well.

Mine is painted with black texture and clear coat and will be in the for sale section soon. PM me if interested.
 
I thought some might be interested in some photos of an installation on a 2001 LX470 with Nav, so here goes:

Putting the plate into the cassette deck (I include this because although the outside looks very different from RT's original installation, the interior looks identical and it does work):
full

How it looks from below with the trim panel on:
full

Detail of the Smallrig joint--amazingly it looks like the plate and the smallrig joint were made for each other!
full

Alas, it did require drilling another hole to fit the location of the 1/4" coarse thread screw mount of the Smallrig:
full

But you can't really even see the original hole. Nice, right?!
full

Here's how it looks with the phone and tablet mounts on. Note that there really is little interference with the existing controls.
full

Now that it is basically set up, it is time to do some wiring. I cut some vent slots to make a hole big enough for four cables (3 USB and one audio). The edges were pretty sharp and I did not happen to have a rubber grommet so I wrapped some camel leather (because I happened to have it) around it and secured on both sides. My only concern is possible overheating, but the front plate will be open and the motors are removed, so I'm just going to hope for the best.
full

So this is what it looks like with a phone and tablet installed (before securing the cables, which I will do later):
full

As previously mentioned, I will shorten the vertical bar holding the phone most likely, but I will wait until I have it in the truck and can decide on final location. Now I've got to install the BT45-TOY and CAS-LEX cable, plus a couple of extra USB motorcycle USB power units so I can power the phone, possibly a dashcam to be mounted behind the phone, and have two more USB power points mounted in the face of the ashtray.

BTW, I got some 90 degree bend USB cables for the inexpensive Amazon Fire HD table (it was only 65 bucks or something) so that the cables were a little neater. Pretty much same price as regular cables, but you have to hunt a bit on Amazon to find the right orientation on the USB power cable.

One other thing; RT had mentioned that he was not sure if it was going to fit (and in fact I had to drill another hole, which was fine), but in case anyone wants to know, the back side of the Smallrig joint ended up about .45 inches away from the plastic trim, which seems to be enough.
full


Oh, I ought to mention that I left one of the USB cables inside the cassette deck so that I can pull it out later for the dashcam power. When I looked at the situation I realized that it was not going to be easy to fish around in there later to get that cable, and also that I did not want the bare metal end of the cable to be floating around in there. So I took a large bit of red heatshrink and coverd up the end of the USB cable, then I took a smaller black bit of heatshrink and covered the end of the red. Then I pulled that out of the front of the cassette deck and into the original hole of the Owl Expedition plate so that I could just reach it there and grab it. Because it is matte black and everything around it is black, you wouldn't notice it unless you knew it was there. So the original hole ended up having a function anyways.
full

The red paint that you see on the screws is actually red nail polish. I used that instead of locktite because I didn't seem to have any of that on hand. Hopefully it will do about the same job. I used it on the 1/4" coarse mounting screw and between the Smallrig joint and the plate as well, to hopefully reduce the possibility it will loosen up with vibration. At least that screw is easily accessible with the radio in-place.
 
Last edited:
John Young said:
Hi all, well I finally got my new old LX470 (2001/39K miles from Japan) back from the garage and I started playing the the tinkertoy, er... Smallrig 15mm rod components. I've tentatively settled on this layout:
full

The nice thing about this system is that you can arbitrarily position things in X-Y space, with lots of flexibilty around the vertical pivot and a bit around the horizontal pivot. So I could position my phone pretty high up near my eyeline for maps and not block the all-important (here in Dubai) aircon vent. Sorry for the poor photo-was holding with one hand and taking photo in the other in a pretty dark garage.

Here's a better picture of the setup:
full

And from the back:
full

I am not going to cut any more rods to length until I actually get the hardpoint installed and can really fiddle with the placement and see if I need to push things further out from the console. It feels pretty rigid. And assuming Owl's the hard point attachments are up to it, I think this should work out ok.

BTW, I didn't quite get the right set of joints for this setup. If you look at the phone you will see it actually has two places to insert rods. I've been thinking of putting in a dashcam, and short vertical rod would be a good place to semi-permanently mount a small dashcam.

Hope to do it all this weekend. I brought back a USA SPEC BT45-TOY Bluetooth module and CAS-LEX cable that purportedly clips in between the cassette deck and the wiring harness to add bluetooth etc. So with a little luck I will have some reasonable functionality. It's a little odd looking to some I am sure, but the semi-matte black and the ability to place the tubes over black areas of the console make it a little less obtrusive, and importantly, none of the important controls are rendered unreachable. Maybe the radio tuning will be a little annoying but I don't listen to the local radio anyways. Wish me luck with this!
Click to expand...

@John Young
Love your setup. Do you have the links to all the GUB clamps you used? I can't find them on amazon.
 
Dharma Dude said:
@John Young
Love your setup. Do you have the links to all the GUB clamps you used? I can't find them on amazon.
Click to expand...

My pleasure DD,

The GUB mounts are oddly hard to search for. I bought two of them. The one that I used for the 8" cheapo tablet I had to modify to get it to be wide enough. You can see it in this photo:
full


Those are actually two of the same GUB mount. Normally they only widen out to 110mm if I remember correctly. For the 8 inch tablet I needed a couple more inches. What I did was disassemble on of the GUB mounts and then rock over to Home Depot and search through their badly organized baggies of metric bolts sold in packages of 1 or 2. I found a very long bolt and used it instead of the knurled adjustment knob in the GUB mount as it came. The metric bolt from Home Depot actually was knurled slightly (allen wrench head bolt) and in practice I've found it is big enough to serve as a knob for tightening the mount around the tablet.

P.S. If I remember correctly, the screw/bolt on the GUB mounts was size M8. But check it.
 
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Dharma Dude said:
@John Young That's very helpful but what about a link for the clamps on the pipes. Those seem hard to find too.
Click to expand...

Here you go:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IMRBPUW/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s03?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0747P6YJ2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B1TCQ39/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZFPK2I/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/SmallRig-Lightweight-Railblock-Thread-Camera/dp/B00D9MCVOY/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1535728811&sr=1-1&keywords=SmallRig+Super+Lightweight+15mm+Railblock+3+with+1/4"-20+Thread+for+Red+and+Other+15mm+DSLR+Camera+Rig+-+942

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0747P6YJ2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

You don't need all of these things. I bought an assortment so I could play around with different setups. I live in the Middle East (where the truck is) and I picked these up on a trip to the US. They are pretty inexpensive (one of the things that attracted me to them--so having them sit around didn't bother me. Just search on the term 'smallrig" on Amazon and you can find all of these and a lot more varieties. It's really an amazingly flexible system.

(Be advised, the rods are made of thick aluminum. Had trouble cutting them with small tubing cutter. Better if you had a beefy pipe cutter. They do come in all kinds of lengths--I bought long ones so I could cut them down to exactly the right size. I still think that is the way to go.)

This stuff is made for expensive camera equipment--it's really well-made and nicely finished. And I'm really happy with the results. They vibrate a bit as there is quite a lot of mass on the end of the rods, but I found I could tension it against the padded part of the dash and it eliminated the issue.

Some more advice: Don't buy this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007GWFN8E/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1

You can't tighten it down enough to prevent rotational slippage. Linear slippage not an issue, but with the way I set things up rotational slippage is key. All the other clamps above have a lock on each individual joint and rotational slippage is not an issue.

One other suggestion: You need USB power for the phone and tablet. I used these and wired them in behind the dash:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076P8DCRQ/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It gets a little crowded back there but I really wanted the cabling to be neat. You also can get right angle USB cables like this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EBGGXS2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This has the correct orientation for the Amazon Fire cheapo tablet. You'd want to check the orientation of the micro USB socket on the tablet you intend to use, but it make the wiring much neater to use a right angle USB cable. Orientation on a USB-C right angle cable would not be an issue if your tablet uses USB-C.
 
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Dharma Dude said:
@John Young
Wow! Thanks!
Click to expand...
Just one other piece of information. When you extend out the GUB mount you also have to find two longer plain guide rods. I found that the upholstery retaining rods in the series 100 seats is the exact right diameter--and I happen to have a few spare sitting around. But any plain steel rods will work. Maybe even stiff coat hanger wire.
 
I've got to get on this install. Been dragging my feet digging into the console. That image of two mounted devices lends to the stability of the mount and mounting location. Thanks for posting.
 
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