A familiar problem to us traveling cameramen is the constant battery charging. At the last count I had 10 different batteries and devices that needed charging for a shoot. This is all ok when you’re at home with your kit laid out but when you hit the road, charging just become an absolute nightmare. This got me thinking, there must be someway of keeping all my chargers organised and not becoming like a massive electronic spaghetti mess every time the batteries need charging.
Spagetti mess pre-shoot.
As it turned out, no one sells a bespoke product to do this but I figured I must be able to build something myself. Hence the Cameraman Charging Peli Case was born.
During my research on how to build something, I did discover that this is actually fairly common for sound recordists to do but unfortunately I can no longer find the links.
The cameraman charging peli case
Peli Case
First off figure out what size Peli you need. I laid all my chargers out to find the minimum size I’d need. I like to keep my kit size down so I went as small as I could, a Peli Case 1400. I picked a second hand one up from eBay for £40.
Power
To power the chargers you need a 4-way that fits in the case. To keep mine as compact as possible I found one with USB and surge protection built in. This set me back £15.99.
Velcro
Attaching the chargers to the Peli Case is the next challenge. Velcro is great for this because you can take the chargers out and put them back in as you like. It’s also got great sticking power and can hold the heaviest of my batteries secure.
Power leads
To get the chargers to fit into such a small space, I replaced the standard Figure of 8 IECs with right angled leads. You can then cut these to length and wire a plug on the end.
Tidying up
To keep all the leads tidy, use self adhesive cable tie mounts to cable tie the leads together. The only one thing to bear in mind with this, if any of your leads have transformers on, you’ll need to undo everything if you need to get it out.
The finished product
