pic: How's this?

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by JVN

1/8" is waaaay overkill for most of those parts. You can definitely go to 0.090" or 0.063" for a lot of them.

Also - We use 5052 for our bent stuff, and 6061 for our flat stuff. 5052 bends a whole lot better.

Just to echo what John said for a minute - 1/8th on a shooter is indeed way too much material. We made our whole shooter out of solid plates of 1/8th sheet. Way too beefy, and it raised our CG way too high. The main concern with your camera mount will be to mount the assembly so that it is rigid enough that the high speed wheel behind it won't make it wobble too much. As long as you have a rigid cross section you can take out a lot of material from your mount and it will do just fine.

Depending on your design, you might benefit from making the back plate of your shooter a little differently. Especially with a single shooting wheel, having some structure to help keep balls aligned is really helpful for repeatability. Here's a picture of Miss Daisy's shooter. They have a similar plate-and-standoff design to your own shooter, but they also have some inner plates to help guide balls down the center of their shooter. You can make this out of thin material since it's even less structural than the sides of your shooter and you should get a bit more of a repeatable shot.

[Brandon Holley]

For another reference, we did most of our shooter design out of 0.050" sheet metal. In a couple of spots (on the gearboxes) we had a few 1/8" plates, but for all of the hoods, mounting flanges, camera brackets, etc. we used 0.050" 5052.

-Brando