Underwater Housing for miniDV

Step 5 Camera tray and retention rails

It's gonna take some trial and error to figure out how wide to make the tray. You want the camera to fit between the tray and the top of the pipe, but also leave a little gap at the bottom for the tripod mount bolt head. A piece of stiff cardboard makes a good trial and error template. Once you have the right width, choose your finished material. I used a piece of 1/8" thick PVC sheet I had laying around. You can use metal, lexan, acrylic. 1/8" aluminum sheet would be nice, but 1/8" thick acrylic would be nice too. I added a nice touch by chamfering the bottom edges so it matched the contour of the pipe. This is probably just a bit of DIY tool masturbation so you may skip it, unless you like that sort of thing.
Put some masking tape on the top and bottom edges of your tray and then place it in the tube (clamp it down to the tube from both ends with a C or quick clamp if you have it). Cut some strips of PVC and glue them to the pipe just resting on the top of the tray. Once it starts to set up, you might want to make sure your tray is free to slide out and has not been glued in.

Note: leave your tray long for now, you can trim it at the very last minute so that the cap closes.

This tray setup really needs to be done before you glue the fixed end cap on.