Advice needed on my set up buoyancy!

Hi everyone.

I would like some advice from anyone with a similar set up to help me with wether I need any stix floats/ float arms for buoyancy. I'm not sure where set up will be positive/neutral/negatively buoyant. Any advice would be much appreciated. I don't wanna hit the water not knowing exactly how it's going to sit and some help beforehand would be great.

I am currently building a set up.

Consists of.

Olympus epl3

PT-EP05l housing

X2 inons2000

Nauticam flexi tray left + right

X1 5" ultralight arm each side (macro)

X1 8" ultrslight arm each side (wide) (possibly both together for wide)

X4 ultralight clamps in total.

Zen dome for 9-18mm oly lens

Zen 45mm macro port panny lens.

Many thanks. Kevin dale

I fear that you wont archieve the needed buoyancy just asking for similar experiences.

The part of the fun is to work on your rig until it has the buoyancy you need.

A rule of thumb is to get more floats than necessary and reduce them or add weigts (as i do).

Most likely you need slightly different floats for your ZEN Dome and the ZEN macro port.

If you have some stix floats spare they will become handy if you add something.

Float arms have not really a lot of positive buoyancy, hard, closed cell foam works much better.

Chris

You can get in the 'ball park' at home. Assemble your complete rig, including all 'O' rings, batteries, etc....

Fill up your bath tub and you'll get a general idea about your buoyancy. Remember salt water is slightly more dense that fresh water so the rig will be very slightly more buoyant in salt water than your tub..

Thanks guys. Was thinkin of trying the bath tub idea. . Haha.

If you have a plastic bin or large container. Grab a set of travel scales (the cheap ones you hold up and lift your luggage.) and weigh your camera in the bin full of water. You will get the 'in water' weight of your rig, you can then get the stix floats or float arms you need - depending on that weight.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks trickster.

Hi there,

I have/had an almost identical set up, but without the dome port and with flex arms, but also with an inon wide angle wet lens, so I guess the total weight is similar. In general it is slightly negatively buoyant, but I found that it is so light that for me at least the negative was not much of a problem. However with that glass dome it probably would tend to tip forwards slightly, but again not very much, so perhaps a small amount of foam under the port would help.

Without the camera in, the housing is just about positive, so with strobes you will possibly need some buoyancy if you want the system to be perfectly neutral.

However I prefer to have a slightly negative camera, and I find it just about right as it is!