MYOG Fix: 3D Printed Washer for My SmallRig Arca Rail

If you’ve been following along here, you know I’m primarily a maker. Sewing, building, tinkering; that’s where I live. But lately I’ve been working toward sharing more of that process on video, which opens up a whole new category of problems. Getting good footage of what your hands are doing is harder than it sounds, and a capable camera on a bad angle is still bad footage.

Getting Better Angles for Maker Videos

What I needed were better angles. Specifically, overhead shots — something that could look straight down, or get a view similar to mine, at the sewing machine or whatever I was working on, showing exactly what was happening without me getting in the frame. So I picked up an arm I could reach over the machine and position for top-down shots. That solved part of the problem.

The other part: I needed a safe, reliable way to get my GH-7 on and off that arm quickly. Cameras and lenses are expensive. “Good enough” isn’t good enough when there’s four figures of gear hanging over the work surface.

The SmallRig Arca Setup

I found the SmallRig Arca mount (Amazon Link). It is plate that can be positioned anywhere you have a threaded mounting point available on your cage. And here’s where a small but important decision came into play.

My cage, like most camera cages, already has a rail built right into the bottom. The obvious move would be to use that. But mounting the camera from the bottom of the cage means it hangs upside down from the arm which means rotating every single clip in post just to get a usable image, and dealing with orientation that always feels slightly off. Not worth it. I put the Arca rail on top of the cage instead: camera right-side up, footage comes out of the card ready to use, no gymnastics in the edit.

Once that was sorted, the Arca system does exactly what you’d want for this kind of workflow: slide the camera on, click it into place, and you’re set. Need a handheld angle? Pop it off, grab your shot, snap it back overhead. No fussing with screws every single time.

For anyone not familiar: Arca-Swiss is a dovetail rail-and-clamp standard that originated in studio photography and has since become the de facto standard across videography and camera rigging. The geometry is simple a rail with a trapezoidal cross-section that slides into a matching clamp and locks with a single knob but the ecosystem built on top of it is enormous. Once your camera has an Arca rail on it, it clips into any compatible head, mount, or arm in seconds. It’s the kind of standard that sounds like a minor convenience until you’ve used it, and then you wonder how you managed without it.

The mount has a long slot for the screws to pass through. On paper, this gives you flexibility. It means you can anchor the rail at any point along that groove.

I tested several combinations. A 3/8-16 paired with a 1/4-20. Two 1/4-20s spaced out across the mount. Nothing settled right. Every setup developed just enough play to be annoying. I wasn’t going to hang my rig on a single screw. You do not trust expensive glass to one point of failure. Two points of contact would keep the rail steady. It was the right call.

And that is where things got interesting.

The Problem: Screws Too Long for a Secure Camera Mount

Both 1/4-20 screws were just a little too long. Not dramatically but enough: instead of drawing the rail tight against the cage, they’d bottom out in the screw holes with the rail still slightly raised off the surface. The result was a small but very real wobble in the mount.

Worth noting: a little wobble in a handheld grip is one thing. In an overhead mount, gravity is working against you any looseness in the connection gets amplified every time the rig flexes or the arm shifts slightly. You’re not just risking a shaky shot. You’re risking a dropped camera directly over your work surface and everything on it.

When you’re hanging a camera overhead, small wobble means camera shake during filming, and a much worse problem waiting to happen. Absolutely unacceptable.

Options: I could hunt down shorter 1/4-20 screws, which meant measuring, ordering, waiting, and hoping I got the length right on the first try. I could stack metal washers under the rail head….imprecise and janky. Or I could embrace my MYOG methodology do what I have printers for.

The Fix: A 3D Printed Washer with a Custom Fit

Lucky for me, I’ve got a couple of Prusa CoreOnes at my disposal. This is exactly the kind of problem they exist to solve.

I grabbed the calipers. The longest part of the whole process was sitting down and getting all the measurements right: the pocket measurements, screw clearance. Once I had those numbers, the rest went fast:

The model itself was about as simple as it gets: a rectangle with circles stacked on the sides with a hole sized to match the screw slot exactly. No chamfers, no fancy geometry — just the shape that fills the gap. Since I wasn’t certain exactly how thick a washer I’d need, I printed three at once in different thicknesses. Better to have options on the plate than to print, test, and wait through another run.

I tried the 1.25mm washer first. Dropped it in, threaded the screw down, tightened it. Solid. No wobble, no play. The Arca rail sitting snug against the cage exactly the way it’s supposed to. Did some test runs with the overhead setup and it was a genuine success. Start to finish, I had working hardware before I’d have finished filling out an order form.

If you’re running into the same issue with your own Arca rail setup, I’ve uploaded the model to Printables so you can print your own.

This Is What MYOG Is About

MYOG, Make Your Own Gear, is a mindset I come back to constantly. Off-the-shelf gear almost works. It gets you 90% of the way there, and then there’s that last 10% where it doesn’t quite fit your setup, your workflow, your specific situation. That gap used to mean either hunting for the right part or learning to live with the compromise.

The MYOG mindset has roots in outdoor and ultralight culture — hikers and backpackers who found that the gear industry wasn’t building exactly what they needed and decided to close the gap themselves. It spread into sewing, crafting, and making broadly. For me it’s become a reflex: before I go looking for a product that almost fits, I ask whether I can just make the thing that fits exactly.

Sometimes the answer is no; specialized materials, tooling I don’t have, complexity I can’t justify. But more often than you’d think, the answer is yes, and what you end up with is something better than anything you could have bought off the shelf. If this resonates, check out all my MYOG thoughts here.

Having a printer makes that calculus shift even further. The washers cost a few cents of filament. The time from calipers to finished part was under fifteen minutes. And because I made them to my own measurements, one fit perfectly on the first real try.

This is what I mean when I talk about MYOG: it’s not always about making something elaborate. Sometimes it’s a small disk with a hole in it. But that small disk is the difference between a mount that wobbles and one you’d trust overhead; between gear that almost works and gear that works for you.

I’ve got a printer. I’ve got calipers. When something doesn’t fit, I measure it and make the part. That’s the whole thing.

What’s Next

The overhead rig is dialed in now, and I can’t wait to use it to bring you more videos about the projects I’m working on. If you’ve got a similar setup or a gear fit problem that’s been nagging at you I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And if you’ve printed your own solutions to camera or gear problems, definitely share them.

That’s what this is all for.