I thought you might be interested in a homemade pano bracket I made for travel:
http://tnphoto.com/giga/pano/

Thanks – definitely interested here. I also have a friend with machine tools but sadly he is usually too busy to use them. Still, what you have made is attractive to me and I am encouraged that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility to have my own. I especially like the weight of 22oz. The Gigapan Pro I travel with weighs an almost literally staggering 116oz.

Do you know how much your camera weighs with its heaviest lens? I imagine it is fairer to compare your head with the Epic 100 but that still weighs 54oz.

Regarding the disk, I imagine it turns freely and that that might be a problem unless there is some mechanism for locking it in place. Is it a problem in practice? Is it simply a matter of being really careful not to knock the lens mid-gigapan?

The Allen wrench clipped to the side of the bracket is used to adjust the tightness of the rotation bearing. It gives just the right amound of resistance.

Great little gadget!

Without the eye-level viewfinder, the camera and bracket are just one kilo (37.5 oz). The Panasonic GX1 packs a 16 Mpx sensor in a very petite package, and the new 42-150mm lens gives me 300mm equivalent for not much more weight than the 14-42mm kit lens. And it’ll auto-bracket in Manual mode, which will let me do HDR panos. Stay tuned!