Hi Saturn, just my tuppence worth on bino stands
I built a parrallogram timber mount for my 15x70 celestron binos last year. i used a hybrid of plans from the net and some parts from an old deck chair with a defunct engineers instrument tripod. it works realy well and I can email you pictures of the finished article or you can come and look at it. Took about half a day to build and cost about 10Euro in hardware, only comment i would make is:
camera tripods tend to flex quite a bit and wont allow you to look up at zenith to easily
the bracket supplied with the binos is plastic and flexes a bit - takes about 5 seconds to come to rest - otherwise tolerable
  