Welcome DJI Spark Pilot!
Jump in and join our free Spark community today!
Sign up

Broken gimbal or can this part be bought separately?

SillyPosition

New Member
Join
Dec 19, 2018
Messages
3
Age
37
Hi,
I had an unfortunate landing where the drone defensive mechanisms got confused by leafs and it landed eventually quite hard on a rock, breaking down the gimbal plastic part that holds the camera.
For deeper inspection it seems that everything is behaving properly except that the camera motor wont react. I suspect that the wiring for that goes through the part that got broken, and not the wires arent able to control anything..
Camera picture is working fine, getting gimbal overload errors and it moves because its not in balance with the camera hanging on its wires.
What do you think I should do with this broken part? What's the cheapest way to get out of this mess?
Im out of warranty
 

Attachments

  • 48429991_1593006214880257_7150790827495653376_n.jpg
    48429991_1593006214880257_7150790827495653376_n.jpg
    151.2 KB · Views: 34
Since you are looking for the cheapest way I would say buy a replacement gimbal on eBay and fix it yourself using YouTube instructions. That method saves money but requires some fairly good "surgical skills". There's a high likelihood that just replacing that visibly broken part will still leave the inner mechanism busted - lots of tiny pieces with low tolerances inside.

The cheapest and most reliable way would be to send it to ThunderDrone for repair. DJI would fix it right too but probably at greater expense.

Going forward the cheapest repairs are with DJI Care Refresh. Once you get it fixed you can get a policy by sending in a Verification Video.

Sorry for your mishap - glad it isn't fatal tho
 
Last edited:
Im still not convinced that perhaps one of the motors are fully functional as well. it looks like the pin, that goes into the prop, is a tiny bit lower than others.
I have good "surgical skills", and willing to repair myself to save costs.
How can I tell that its only the camera that needs replacement? I see that the gimbal moves but not familiar with the entire system - is there a way to know that? because just the camera with the cables belonging to it starts from about 110$ on aliexpress
 
Motors are fairly cheap and tiny wires in arms need a bit of delicate soldering. But if just that one part is $110 it sounds like an expensIve repair no matter who does it. The pros will make sure everything fully functional before you get it back.

I'd leave it up to a professional repair shop and chalk it up as a lesson learned.The last thing you'd want to do is waste time and money on an inadequate self-repair and still have to send it in.

We all have mishaps when flying - hopefully each one teaches us something

ThunderDrones ----> DJI Care Refresh
 
My advice, don't go cheap!
From what I have seen with my repair orders at DJI, they are cheap enough not to "total loss" the craft.
Like $125 - $175
Usually $60/hr labor and $20 for the gimbal - but as pointed out, they test EVERYTHING to make sure you are getting back a 100% craft
Send it in for a sound repair.
 

New Posts

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
14,606
Messages
118,830
Members
18,021
Latest member
Dmizzoni