The Thumb Grip is a Harsh Mistress

Ah, the thumb grip. If you've ever used a rangefinder-style camera, you probably know how helpful a little extra grip can be. Film rangefinders (and SLRs) had a thumb grip (of sorts) in the film advance lever.

Nikkormat FT2's Film Advance Lever

Of course digital rangefinders, like the Leica M or Fuji X100S, have no need for such a mechanism. Duh. But Leica et al have decided we don't need no steenking thumb grips! and left them off of their contemporary rangefinders.

Leica M

Fujifilm X100S

It's said that nature abhors a vacuum. Well apparently third-party equipment manufacturers really despise them. There are countless thumb grips available in a range of shapes and colors (as long as the range of colors starts at black, ends at silver, and has nothing between). I happen to own the HorusBennu TG-1 thumb grip for my X100S, and I love it. It helps my giant hot-dog fingers hold onto the comparatively tiny camera.

The HorusBennu TG-1 on my X100S

But I also hate the TG-1--it uses the hot shoe as the attachment point to the camera, thus preventing me from attaching a flash, radio trigger, sync cable, disco ball, toaster oven, personal massager, etc.

As far as I know, all rangefinder thumb grips occupy the hot shoe. Match Technical makes one with a cold shoe, so you can attach an optical viewfinder. But a cold shoe is not a hot shoe. Otherwise it'd be called a hot shoe. And it'd be hot. With electrons.

Match Technical's Thumb Grip w/Cold Shoe

From an engineering perspective, this really doesn't seem like a difficult task, and I can't be the only one who'd like to have a thumb grip and a hot shoe... but that product doesn't exist.

Well, I should say that product isn't available from any manufacturer. Michael Bass will hand craft one for you if you send him $175 and your $110 Thumbs Up grip. That's right--for a mere $285, you can have a thumb grip with a hot shoe. Yikes. Granted, it does TTL pass-through, which for my purposes is really not necessary. I don't own any Fuji flashes, and I prefer to manually set my flashes anyway.

Michael Bass' Hand-Crafted Beast of a Thumb Grip

So this is where things are going to get interesting, and a bit dicey. I'm going to try my hand at engineering a solution. I have a need and some moxie, but I also have an expensive and very new X100S that I'd rather not fry, or melt, or mutilate.

Regardless of whether I fail or succeed, I'll share the result (and the process) with you. Wish me luck!