Result of Trial

Last Saturday, I drove east with the prototype tripod easel and got to Columbia river near Quincy. I spent about an hour and a half there for painting. I'll post the painting later but I want to write about the easel today. It worked almost as I expected except for two issues.
The first issue was stableness or firmness of the box while I'm painting. It's reasonably acceptable but I felt a little weakness when I pushed my brushes against a 16"x12" stretched canvas. Especially when I was painting away from the center toward the right edge. The main cause seems to be the structure of the platform at the top of the tripod. It's a sort of "C" shaped mechanism to let it lean up to 90 degrees toward left as you can see in the photo on the left. It definitely makes me easier to mount the box though. I may be able to find another one that is more steady. But it would be expensive. Instead, I'll try putting a piece of wood underneath of the platform to support the top plate.
The second issue was the supporting mechanism of top half of the box (picture on the right). The chanin worked fine to ajust the angle and support it not to open too wide. The problem was with the wood stick to support it not to fold down. Basically it's not adjustable. I tried tacking it between two cross-supporting wood as in the pic. Didn't work well. After I came back home, I ordered a set of metalic hinge support on-line because I coudn't find a simple one I needed at any hardware shops, like Home Depot. I'll try attaching them to replace the chain and the wood sticks.
After these adjustments, I'll try this again at somewhere.