I purchased two 150qt Coleman Xtreme Marine coolers. The local Wally World had them in stock and for a pretty good price & I figured that I should be able to fit a bull elk in two of those plus by 55qt Lifetime cooler in September. Nothing fancy but should get the job done.
I decided to go with the coolers because I knew that I could try and make a DIY digiscoping adapter using a flip up scope cap and a phone case. Full disclosure, I had previously attempted on a number of occasions to make a DIY digiscoping adapter but none of them ended up being as functional as I had hoped so I honestly didn't have too high of expectations for this little project but this one actually turned out much better than I had anticipated. Here's a couple shots of the finished product & then we'll get into how I made it:
My plan to make a digiscope adapter was to buy a cheap phone case for my phone and an inexpensive flip up scope cover that fits the eyepiece of my spotting scope. Then spend some time getting the phone case and the scope cover to line up just right and super glue them together.
I have a Vanguard Endeavor HD 65 spotting scope and the best measurement I could get on the eyepiece was between 2.040" and 2.050". On my previous attempt at building one of these I bought a scope cover that was sized to match exactly my eyepiece measurements. This ended up being a mistake because it was too tight on the scope eyepiece and I didn't like how much effort it took to push the adapter onto the scope and then to remove it. This time I decided I would purchase one that was a size bigger than the measurements I had made. I found a $3 phone case on Amazon and then found a flip up scope cover for about $7 (link). I have no clue what the actual brand of the scope cover is or what brand it is a knock off of... but according to the sizing measurements I took and wanting to get it one size big so that it would just slip on I decided to get a 53mm cover (2.100").
I did a quick test with the scope cover on the eyepiece of my scope and I liked that it slipped on, was still snug, and the phone didn't sag at all. It looks like I actually got the size that will work like I want.
On the scope cover I located the center of the cap and drilled a small hole. I drilled out that hole with progressively larger bits to ensure that the hole was as close to the center as possible. Then it got tricky... my phone has two cameras, one that is a standard camera and one that is a panoramic camera... I wanted to use the standard camera so I centered the hole in the cap over that camera and made a couple marks on the phone case to give me a reference of where to start gluing them together. I didn't want to super glue my phone into the case so I had to be careful, I glued a couple small spots where I knew the glue wouldn't run onto my phone and once that was set up I removed my phone from the case and finished gluing all the spots where the two surfaces met.
Once the glue was dry I tried it out on my spotter and I am very happy with how this one works. If you decide to make something similar I would definitely recommend taking your time and making sure that the hole you drill in the scope cover cap is centered & then take a good amount of time to make sure the hole in the scope cover cap is centered over the camera that you want to use. I haven't tried it out in the field yet but it worked very nicely looking at the horses in the field about 300 yards away. The only drawback is that this digiscope adapter will only fit my phone and my scope where if I would have gotten the genuine PhoneSkope I would have gotten a universal kit to work with most spotting scope eyepieces. But I'll deal with that since I was able to put this one together for 1 tenth of the cost of the commercial product. Hopefully it will work well for me on my elk hunt this year.
