Manfrotto 410 Head: Gear-Jammed.

[Keith Tapscott.]

One of the gears on my Manfrotto 410 head has seized solid. I can move the smaller knob which does the fine adjustment, but the larger quick-action knob seems to be seized-up real tight and I cant budge it.
Any ideas how to fix it?

 

[epavelin]

If you carefully peel off the round stickers on the head, there are screws behind them which allow you to dismantle the head. I think they require an allen key, if my memory serves me correctly. The mechanism inside is very simple.

A word of warning though. When I attempted to fix my own head (it had got very stiff) there ended up being play in the gears after I put it back together - probably through lack of grease. I ended up sending it to Manfrotto UK for servicing, which cost about £35, but it came back as good as new.

Ed.

 

[Keith Tapscott.]

I managed to free it at last. It's working fine again now. Thanks for the reply.

 

[lxdude]

I managed to free it at last. It's working fine again now. Thanks for the reply.

What do you think happened? Did it jam at the end of travel, or just freeze up? I'm considering getting one, and am curious about reliability.

 

[Keith Tapscott.]

What do you think happened? Did it jam at the end of travel, or just freeze up? I'm considering getting one, and am curious about reliability.

I'm not sure how it happened, but a very hard twist with a towel wrapped around it did the business.
It's working as new again at the moment.

 

[KC2PED]

My collapsed fell over a week ago (nothing attached) and landed on the upper clutch release knob. I never thought anything about it but when I next went out with it I couldn't elevate my telescope. Both the clutch and the gears were frozen. Last night I put an 8" ChanneLock on at and gave it a twist which freed everything up I thought. When I checked it to make sure I had full range of motion I found that it was fine from 0-45 but got stiffer the higher I went and past 45 it was getting stiff enough it hurt my hand to turn the crank. Up around 60 is seemed to be locked up but the clutch still worked so I set it back to 0 and tested down. Same thing. I got it somewhere where I had decent motion over most of the range that I use but it seems to me like releasing the clutch frees it up for a while and the more I crank the gears the stiffer they get. I will just have to remember to use the clutch to get into the neighborhood and only use the gears for fine adjustment and keeping my target in the field of view. I suspect that I have bent that shaft.