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Vibration and dust are common enemies of cameras and other electronic equipment in sawmills. We’ve already covered the importance of cameras that are specifically designed for sawmills—the safest way to stop replacing your gear every couple of months and to avoid gaps in your feeds.
But cameras aren’t stand-alone equipment. The mount they’re attached to is equally important.
What Are Vibration-Resistant Mounts for Sawmill Video Cameras?
As the name suggests, vibration-resistant camera mounts are key components for reducing the impacts of noise and vibration on electrical equipment in environments where heavy machinery is used.
Vibration mounts are a low-cost way to protect expensive video monitoring equipment. They are designed to absorb sound and vibration from the equipment in their proximity. The result? You minimize the wear and tear on your camera and extend its useful life.
How Do Vibration-Resistant Mounts Extend Your Sawmill Cameras’ Lives?
To understand why these mounts work, let’s take a quick look at their anatomy. The VM-1 mount for our CC02 camera is designed for extreme vibration applications—exactly what you’d find in a sawmill.
It’s made with advanced vibration-damping polymers to “cushion” the vibration that may affect your camera lens. Additionally, it’s made of heavy-gauge aluminum, which ensures its own strength.
These two design features combined not only prolong the life of your camera but also provide steady images and a crystal-clear feed that you can review or watch in real-time. Why does this matter so much?
Video monitoring is the surest way to spot operational and safety issues before they cause damage, injury, or downtime. Vibration, dust, and other factors present in sawmills can make that video monitoring tough, putting camera equipment in less-than-ideal conditions.
Even Apple cautions against the risks of vibration for electronic cameras: “long-term direct exposure to high-amplitude vibrations within certain frequency ranges may degrade the performance of these systems and lead to reduced image quality for photos and videos.”
You can advise regular iPhone users to avoid exposing their phones to high-amplitude vibrations frequently. But you can’t do the same for sawmills, can you?
This is why we’ve spent decades building video monitoring equipment that can withstand harsh environments like sawmills.
At Opticom, we take this mission seriously. Here’s the ultimate proof:
Sawmills Cameras Can Withstand Log Debarker Vibration for Years
This story comes from an Opticom customer in Mississippi. Before Opticom, they were replacing cameras every few weeks. When they replaced off-the-shelf cameras with Opticom industrial cameras, they ended up using the same one for more than six years (and counting)!
We set them up with our industrial cameras along with our VM-1 vibration mounts, including one installed directly on their log debarker. After six years, all that sawmill had to do was replace the mount—the camera was still good to go! Because the mount took the brunt of the vibrational forces, the cameras still work great, and of course the mount lasted longer than most cameras could.
If you’re a fan of extreme stories, we’ve got another one for you. In this one, a camera and mount got hit by a log. Normally, you’d say goodbye to that camera and proceed to order yet another new one. But this sawmill didn’t have to do that. The camera was perfectly fine because:
- Opticom cameras are built tough
- The vibration mount helped cushion the blow
The mount got bent (it was hit by a log, after all!). However, the camera is in perfect working condition. The sawmill replaced the mount—with little to no operational downtime—and got back to work.
Dedicated Video Monitoring for Sawmills
At Opticom, we don’t simply sell cameras. We sell future-proof solutions for sawmill monitoring.
When you buy an Opticom product, you also get the assistance of our experts with years of experience in sawmills and other harsh environments. We know how to create the perfect turnkey solution for you so that you don’t have to replace components every week.
We’ve been in this business for 50 years and, while innovation is still an important component of what we do, we also believe strongly in being your partner, not just your vendor.
Have questions about vibration mounts, sawmill cameras, or video monitoring equipment for harsh environments? Our consultants are just a click away.
