06Mar Smallrig EVF arm slips under pressure, here’s a quick fix
I’ve been testing out the Smallrig 1422 EVF Nato mount arm a little more this week and I ran into a bit of a problem. The setup above (MustHD 5.6 inch panel on the Smallrig EVF mount) seems to be a dangerous combination. I’ll admit that the MustHD is one of the heaviest monitors in this form factor with it’s dual battery mount, and thick plastic body, but it was surprising to me that it had enough weight to defeat the holding power of the Smallrig EVF mount.
Thinking it was simply a matter of tightness, I decided to snug the tensioning thumbscrew all the way down. Turns out that doesn’t actually fix anything. In fact, after looking over the design, it’s probably a bad idea. While the normal urge is to tighten things down as tight as you can with this sort of device, that’s not really a good idea with Smallrig’s design as you’ll see in a second.
Since the Smallrig EVF mount wasn’t really functioning correctly, i decided to take it apart. Basically what’s inside is a plastic spacer. In the right position it’ll snug up the clamp against the rotating portion and lock it into place. However if it gets into the position above, it wont clamp down anything.
While I had the Smallrig 1422 EVF Nato mount apart, I decided to take a closer look at the plastic spacer. It appears to be a cut off piece from a very large zip tie. If you look close, you can actually see the uneven cut marks on either side of this little “spacer”.
In order to fix the problem, I had to rotate the spacer on the Smallrig EVF mount to the position above. Once that was done the locking power of the clamp seems return.
While this is a pretty easy fix and probably not the end of the world, it’s still a problem worth noting. If the spacer were a bit longer, there wouldn’t be the opportunity for the spacer to slip into a position that disables the clamp. As is if the Smallrig EVF mount’s spacer ring slips into the wrong spot, the clamp will provide almost no holding power.
After making this change, I was able to get the MustHD 5.6 inch panel to stay in place. If you are having experiencing this problem with your adapter, you might want to give this a try. Hopefully Smallrig will address this problem in the future.
March 7th, 2015 at 10:26 am
Ok that looks like a simple fix, so really the issue is that SmallRig must make a spacer to go completely around with little to no space, thus it should not be a C that makes perfect sense as to why a joint would fail and slip if the spacer moved.
Lets hope they make this fix as its so simple and will obviously make all the difference when using the arm for monitor use. I have notified them of this issue.
April 23rd, 2015 at 1:16 pm
Do you think its possible to position the L-bracket that holds the field monitor on the other side of the vertical arm? It would be nice to be able to flip the monitor directly above or below the camera, when holding the camera over head.