DJI Mavic, Air and Mini Drones
Friendly, Helpful & Knowledgeable Community
Join Us Now

Mavic Pro Gimbal damaged in crash advice please

KIGR

Member
Joined
Dec 25, 2017
Messages
19
Reactions
6
Location
Kangaroo Island
After 6 months of incident free flying I eventually crashed... After a couple of hours filming and getting close to completing my task I got a little impatient and tried to beat an automatic door and clipped a prop on the edge of the door flipping the mavic and crashing from a height of 4ft onto a tiled floor. I was flying very slow but the crash was enough to damage the gimbal as in the attached photos...

After reading some other posts I intend to remove the gimbal and have a good look, however due to the fact that I live on an island and would require to have parts sent over I'm hoping that someone can see anything in these photos that needs replacing in addition to the absorption plate and ribbon or advise other parts that should be replace while I'm at it?

I would appreciate any assistance/advice given.

cheers,

Graemegimbal.jpg gimbal1.jpg
 

Attachments

  • gimbal2.jpg
    gimbal2.jpg
    171.9 KB · Views: 19
Like you said, gimbal plate for sure. You can look for other obvious things first, broken parts such as motors, arms, etc. then you can work on the error messages. Move the gimbal through its axes and see if there is any resistance. If you are going to do a self repair, its going to be hard to diagnose any gimbal error messages. such as an overload or obstruction, without first having the plate in place.

I try to replace the plate before doing any repairs. If you decide to power it on before replacing the plate, you might think about opening up the Mavic first, then try to support the gimbal because it will flip around doing it's initial calibration and could possibly lock up if it gets caught on anything.

If you get this far, and have done troubleshooting this far, check to see what error messages you get. Are you getting video feed? Any gimbal error messages?
 
Like you said, gimbal plate for sure. You can look for other obvious things first, broken parts such as motors, arms, etc. then you can work on the error messages. Move the gimbal through its axes and see if there is any resistance. If you are going to do a self repair, its going to be hard to diagnose any gimbal error messages. such as an overload or obstruction, without first having the plate in place.

I try to replace the plate before doing any repairs. If you decide to power it on before replacing the plate, you might think about opening up the Mavic first, then try to support the gimbal because it will flip around doing it's initial calibration and could possibly lock up if it gets caught on anything.

If you get this far, and have done troubleshooting this far, check to see what error messages you get. Are you getting video feed? Any gimbal error messages?

Thanks for your response... The only other damage I noticed was a chip in a blade and I have a spare for that. I haven't been keen to turn it on since the crash so haven't seen any error messages as yet. Unfortunately I wont be able to get to it for a couple of days so thought I would get ahead of myself and order the plate and wondered whether I should order a ribbon as well or as you intimated I might open it and power up to see if there are any error messages first.

Thanks again.
 
Yes that's what I would do. Order a ribbon cable and a plate that would be a good starting point. It looks like your silver video cable is solid so I wouldn't replace that 1 quite yet.
 
Last edited:
Oh, and just to be safe, I would order the entire gimbal plate assembly including rubber bands. Many times you won't be able to see it but one rubber band might have gotten stretched too far or torn a little bit.
 
  • Like
Reactions: KIGR
Oh, and just to be safe, I would order the entire gimbal plate assembly including rubber bands. Many times you won't be able to see it but one rubber band might have gotten stretched too far or torn a little bit.

I thought i'd reply to let you know how I got on... It took a couple of weeks for the parts to arrive ( absorption plate and ribbon) and so I got started on the repair and changed the plate. I chose not to do the ribbon as the original looked OK. I put it all back together and on start up the gimbal didn't do a complete calibration and ended up stopping looking down and to the right. I did some gentle manipulation and it straightened up. (I had recalibrated everything prior to start up) I then took flight and everything went ok. Unfortunately subsequent start ups had the same result so I soon realised I had to change the ribbon as well and in doing that it appears to be working as it should (I haven't flown it yet but it starts fine)

Just a quick question... Some of the connections had a type of silicon glue hold them in place, is there a need to re-glue them?

Cheers,

Graeme
 
Lycus Tech Mavic Air 3 Case

DJI Drone Deals

New Threads

Forum statistics

Threads
130,599
Messages
1,554,260
Members
159,605
Latest member
petravka