Almost everything in our world is aluminium.
Camera bodies. Mounting plates. Top handles. Cheese plates. Magic arms. If you've spent any time in the camera department, you know the feel of cold anodised black aluminium on the palm — the slight ring when you tap it, the weight that says serious work tool.
So when we started designing OBM-1, a year ago, aluminium was the plan. CNC-machined, anodised matte black. The obvious choice for a tool that lives on a camera.
It was also, for a one-person, self-funded startup, not a realistic one. Not yet.
CNC aluminium scales well once you're ordering in the thousands. At the volumes we could actually afford to start with, the machining cost alone would have pushed OBM-1 somewhere we didn't want it to sit. So we did what most hardware startups do at this stage — we found a material that let us build something real without needing someone else's money first.
That material was PA12S: a nylon variant, built layer by layer from powder, no tooling required. Light. Strong. Flexible to design around. And — this was the part that mattered most — it let us start.
So we started. Over the following months we printed, and printed again. More than seventy rounds — prototypes, tolerance tests, finishing processes tried and quietly abandoned. A rib moved half a millimetre. A wall thickness reconsidered. A surface treatment that looked right in photos and wrong in the hand.
Most of it wasn't really about tolerances. It was about a feeling we couldn't quite manufacture: the sense, holding it, that this was built for the same world as the camera it sits on.
We got close. Close isn't the same as right, though — not for a device that's meant to live on a professional's camera for years, not months.
There was no funding round behind what happened next. No Kickstarter, no investor deck to justify it to — just the growing certainty that the housing was the one part of OBM-1 we couldn't afford to get slightly wrong, and that the material we'd chosen for entirely sensible reasons wasn't going to get us there.
So we went back to the plan we'd started with.
OBM-1's housing is CNC-machined from AL6061 — the same alloy as half the rig sitting around it — anodised black to Type II, finished with a light bead-blast so it reads as matte rather than raw metal. Internal ribs stiffen the chassis against flex. The tolerances leave enough give to absorb the small knocks a working set hands out, without anything working loose.
The buttons went through the same reckoning, on a smaller scale. Injection moulding means committing to a tool — an expensive, fixed piece of steel that only earns its cost once the part inside it is exactly right. We went through several rounds before it was: chasing a surface finish fine and even enough that the buttons feel like they came from the same material family as the housing. They didn't, at first. Now they do.
A year of prototypes to arrive back where we started might look like we went in a circle. It doesn't feel that way from here. PA12S taught us exactly what OBM-1 needed to be — the tolerances, the rib placement, the hundred small decisions that only reveal themselves once you're holding a part in your hand. Aluminium is what let us build that properly, once we knew.
The plan didn't change. What we learned on the way there did.