The other ring

I had to take care of another ring for a while. You can't pull focus with it. It did get me married, though.

So yes, Focus Rings went quiet. The wedding is a good excuse. It's just not the whole excuse.

The honest version: my first hard-stop gear worked perfectly. On my motor. That's roughly like a tailor telling you the suit fits great because he tried it on himself.

I'm a solo filmmaker. I built the thing at my own bench, for my own rig, tested it with my own lens and my own motor, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do. Standing there, that feels like a finished product. It isn't. It's a prototype with one very satisfied customer.

A few teeth

Then came the question I should have asked a lot earlier: what happens when somebody uses a different motor?

A hard stop depends on two things. How far the lens actually travels, and the gear that drives it. Change the motor pinion, a few teeth more or less, a different width, and the stop ends up somewhere else. Not wildly somewhere else. Just far enough to be wrong. And "slightly wrong" is a pretty bad feature for a part whose only job is to be exactly right.

"Module 0.8" doesn't save you here. It tells you the teeth will mesh. It tells you nothing about the motor on the other side.

I could have called it close enough and kept selling. I'm chaotic about plenty of things. Parts that end up on somebody's camera aren't one of them. So I closed the old shop and rebuilt the whole thing around the information it actually needs.

The hard-stop generator now asks for your focus motor, or for the tooth count and width of your motor gear if it isn't on the list. Plus your lens size and focus travel. The stops get calculated for that exact combination.

You still have to test the print on your real rig. No browser form replaces that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But at least the form no longer quietly assumes you own my motor.

Meanwhile, life happened

This year I got engaged, got married and became a father. In between I kept shooting, kept running a business on my own, and the website waited.

My daughter is easily the biggest production of the year. Worst call sheet I've ever worked with. Nobody tells you when wrap is.

None of that explains a wrong dimension. It's just what the year looked like from here. The rebuild took longer than I wanted, and I'd rather say that straight than call it a "strategic pause".

What's back

Focus Rings is back as a set of tools for making parts to your measurements. There's a free standard focus gear if you just want to start with fit, and configurable rings and hard stops if your rig needs more. Not every part has to be complicated. It just has to ask the right questions before the printer starts.

Since all this, I've become deeply suspicious of any product that says "works with everything". Especially when I wrote it.