Equipment

The Care and Feeding of Your Tripod

Published June 15, 2012

Being a good photographer, you have a tripod. Maybe two tripods. Maybe even a big, heavy duty one for your big lenses, a standard one for everyday use, and one of those small, cool ones that folds up like a road map and you can carry it in your back pocket. Wait, I just realized 50% of the people reading this think a road map comes on Google or is inside their GPS and are completely puzzled about how you would fold it up. So I’ll tell you:

You see, children, once upon a time, maps came on a sheet of paper bigger than the windshield of your car but folded neatly into a little square the size of a Kindle. Maps couldn’t even say things like “Turn right in 200 yards”; you had to actually look at it and figure out where you wanted to go. But if you opened it up to look at it while driving, the map would cover the windshield and you’d have a wreck. On the other hand, if you weren’t driving, you rarely needed a map.

This presented quite a dilemma. Amateur travelers would steer the car with a knee while wadding the huge sheet of paper so they could see the area they were interested in. (This is what we did before we had texting-while-driving to distract us.) Real professional travelers had the skills of a one-armed Origami artist and could fold the map so the small part they were interested in was on top, while never taking their left hand off of the steering wheel. This was back when men were iron and ships were wood, though. Such skills do not exist today – except in certain little tripods that can be folded up to be about a foot long. But, I digress. A lot.

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. Anyway, over time our nice, shiny, smoothly moving tripods tend to get jacked up a bit. Sand or salt-water gets in the legs and they don’t move smoothly anymore. Lever-lock latches don’t hold the legs quite as firmly as they used to and we find our carefully positioned tripod slllloooooowwwwly sliding to one side if we put a bit too much weight on it. Sometimes the internal locks and shims on the legs get knocked around and we have one leg that won’t slide all the way back into our tripod, or one section falls out entirely.

Luckily, tripods are probably the easiest things in a photographer’s kit to disassemble, clean internally, troubleshoot, and fix. So I thought I’d put together a little how-to-fix-it-up guide for those of you who have a gritty, sticky, loose, or just plain dirty tripod. We’ll start at the bottom and work our way up.

Changing Feet

Almost everyone knows it, but just in case you don’t, the feet on most tripods simply unscrew and can be replaced. Most manufacturers sell, or include, alternative feet so that you can use spikes in dirt or grass and rubber feet on concrete or rocks. But you can also simply buy some replacement feet when yours get worn out.

Cleaning and Repairing Twist Lock Legs

Most Giottos, Fiesol, Induro, Gitzo, and many other tripods use twist-lock legs. The designs differ very little and they generally function the same way. When a section of leg becomes stiff, gritty, or jams simply unscrew the lock all the way until it comes off of its threads and slides down onto the section of leg below it. There is usually some thick lubricant on the threads, as you can see in the picture below. Leave that alone if you can, but if there is a lot of sand or grit in it you may need to wipe it off and replace it when you reassemble.

As  you slide the leg section out, there will be a plastic lock bushing (in the center of the image above) that will come out along with the leg. As you pull the leg section further, you’ll feel a bit of resistance just as it’s about to come loose and will notice two half-circle nylon shims or bushings at the top of the leg (in the image below one is still on the leg, the other sitting on the desk).

Your tripod may vary a bit in shim appearance (they might be black, or a single shim that nearly goes around the entire leg, etc.) but the basic design is always the same. If your tripod leg was jammed and you don’t see shims come out with it, they probably came off and are inside the leg section above this. You may need to remove that section to find them because they’re often jammed up near the top of it.

At this point we can wipe all of the grit off of the shims and leg and clean them up nicely. You might also put a soft rag up into the leg section above to wipe any remaining grit left in it. You can probably just barely make out some dirt and grit on the upper part of the carbon fiber leg and the white nylon shims in the image above. That was what caused the leg to be gritty when sliding it in and out.

Before reassembling it’s a good idea to put just a little bit of dry lubricant, like powdered graphite, on the nylon shims and / or on the inside of the upper leg section. If you need to replace the lubricant on the threads, check your manufacturer’s website to see if they recommend a certain lubricant. If they don’t, we’ve found a waterproof, silicone-based lubricant like Novagard or Versilube seems to work fine. You can get any of the lubricants at Amazon, and, now that I think of it, it’s probably a good idea to get them before you disassemble the tripod. As with most lubricants, a little bit is enough; rub a bit of graphite on the shim with a fingertip, dab a bit of lubricant on the thread with a toothpick.

 respeReassembly is pretty straightforward. There is usually a hole in the side of the tripod leg that fits a plug in the nylon shim as shown below.

Hold the shims in place on the leg and insert. NOTE: with some tripods there is a guide in the upper leg that slides between the two shims as you insert (you can look or feel in the upper leg with your finger to see if there is). If that’s the case, line the space between the shims up properly or the leg won’t slide in easily.

After you slide the leg section a few inches into the section above, then slide the plastic lock bushing along the lower leg until it’s seated inside the upper leg (it’s halfway there in the picture below). Finally, you slide the twist-lock up, screw it back in place, and test that it locks the leg properly and the leg slides smoothly when it’s loosened. I say test it just because it sounds like a good idea. We’ve done this hundreds of times and never had one that wasn’t working just fine after reassembly.

Of course, you’ll have to repeat this for as many sections of the leg as have problems and on as many legs as have problems. I suggest, at least at first, you do one section at a time starting at the bottom section. The shims and bushings are specific sizes for each leg section and getting them confused means a lot of trial and error during reassembly.

 Cleaning and Repairing Lever Lock Legs

A lot of Benro, Cullman, Manfrotto, and Oben tripods use lever lock legs. Most use two different fasteners for each section: one that holds the section on the leg, the other that adjusts tension of the lever lock. Depending on brand you may need a nut driver, hex key, or both (like the one in the picture below) to disassemble these. Some smaller Bogen and Manfrotto tripods use a different type of lever lock that has a center pin that must be driven out with a hammer and awl. If you want to remove the lever lock on this type of  tripod, they have a video of how to do it here: www.bogentripodparts.com/repairs.htm

By far the most common thing you’ll want to do with your lever-lock tripod is adjust the lock tension. It may be stiffer than you like early on, or may get too loose and not grip the legs tightly over time. It’s simple to do: simply put the right tool (hex key or nut driver) on the bolt with the lever in open position, and slowly tighten it while flipping the lever open and closed until it has just the tension you want.

It seems a little less common for lever-lock tripod legs to get grit and sand inside, but they can. Disassembly is pretty similar to that for twist-lock legs, except for needing tools to remove the lever locks. Remove both of the clamping screws / nuts. There is a spring in the lever-lock side of the assembly but for the vast majority of tripods it will not come out when you remove the lever and nut (even if it does, it’s easy to put back).

You may need to twist or rock the locking assembly just a bit and then slide it down over the lower leg. In the picture below you can see some salt residue had gotten under the lock from the tripod being used in or near salt water.

There will be two semicircular shims (or a single nearly circular shim) as shown below, but no lock bushing when you remove the lower leg section.

You can clean things off now, just as you did for the twist-lock leg. You won’t need any silicone grease since there is no twist lock, but a bit of powdered graphite rubbed inside the upper tube or over the outside of the shims before reinserting the lower section helps keeping things sliding smoothly.

Next it’s a simple matter to replace the lever locks and bolts where they came from. One “learn from my mistakes” hint: make sure you line the lever up with the ones above it so the latches are all in a nice straight line when the tripod is collapsed. Otherwise you get to loosen and tighten them again.

Removing the Legs

It’s actually pretty rare to have to remove the legs or work at the center of the tripod where the legs come together.  Every tripod is a bit different in this area, but simply looking around a bit makes it pretty apparent how the legs can be removed. In smaller tripods, like the one below, it’s often as simple as a couple of hex keys or bolts holding each leg in place.

With larger tripods it’s often more complex, though. One common arrangement is a clam shell of two plates that can be taken apart. . .

 . . . . to give access to the leg mounts.

If there’s a center post tension knob like the tripod above, there will be a spring inside, but as long as you don’t drop it reassembly is pretty straightforward. Probably because there’s a lot less movement up at the leg mounts, there seems to be little that ever goes wrong here and it’s rarely necessary to remove them except to replace a broken leg.

Center Posts

Center posts are rather simple things and rarely require any maintenance: if sand or dirt gets on them, you wipe it off, run the post up and down a couple of times, and wipe it off again. Very occasionally something will get into the friction lock of the center post. While removing them is usually straightforward, almost every single one is different. If you look around, though, you’ll almost always see a way to remove the base plate (usually a set screw or hex screw is removed, then the plate either pulls off or unscrews). Once the end plate is off  you can remove the center post.

Other times, there is an obvious twist-lock around the center post that will unscrew just like on a twist-lock leg. Generally there is just a one-piece shim in this kind of arrangement.

Replacement Parts

There is a great deal of variation between the different brands regarding ordering replacement parts. Bogen-Manfrotto not only sell parts directly and easily from BogenTripodParts.com, they offer photos of the various parts for each tripod so you can easily get the part number you need. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, that website alone may steer you to a Bogen or Manfrotto tripod. Gitzo also has a really great parts supply website at www.gitzo.com/service/service+repair/. You just type in your product number and it takes you to a schematic that provides all of the part numbers, which you can order online.

I haven’t found simple online parts ordering for any of the other brands. In many cases, though, if you email customer support at the manufacturer of your tripod, they will try to get a part for you. It’s often helpful to have a picture of the part you can send them. You can occasionally find parts on eBay. You may also find broken tripods for sale there at very low cost.  Here’s a hint: if you buy a tripod with one bad leg you can use one good leg to fix your tripod, and sell the other good leg for almost what you paid for the broken tripod. Or keep it, just in case.

Roger Cicala and Aaron Closz

Lensrentals.com

June, 2012

All photos courtesy Aaron Closz. All fingers in photos courtesy Roger Cicala

Author: Roger Cicala

I’m Roger and I am the founder of Lensrentals.com. Hailed as one of the optic nerds here, I enjoy shooting collimated light through 30X microscope objectives in my spare time. When I do take real pictures I like using something different: a Medium format, or Pentax K1, or a Sony RX1R.

Posted in Equipment
  • chrisgull

    Roger, Thanks for posting.

  • Roger Cicala

    Enzo, if I understand correctly, those are the shims that keep the legs from coming all the way out. If you remove them and the legs aren’t locked tight, you can pull the leg pieces all the way out of the tripod.

  • enzo

    hi,
    if i loose the “white plastic (in the photo)” when i remove totally the legs..is a problem?
    i try to use the sirui t005 without them , and is work great

  • Dave

    Dose anyone know where to get the plastic lock bushings for the telescopic tripods? Crazy that I can’t find any online or at stores.

  • Jeff

    With the lever-lock tripods, would it make sense to get the tension just the way you like it, then put a drop of lightweight threadlock on the screw so you never have to adjust it again?

  • And I should have added: clean the bottoms of the legs often. At least do it with your hand or a towel to knock off loose material before putting it back in whatever vehicle or bag you use to carry the tripod and wash them before they go into anything where the grit can build up, shake loose and move into the joints.

  • Frank Kolwicz

    I’ve been using a Gitzo for over 20 years and have only had to clean one of the leg sliders once. The secret? I slide the lowest section down at least 6″ and leave it that way unless I have to pack the tripod to it’s absolute minimum for some reason. And, of course, slide them back out as soon as you can.

    In sand, the first thing I do is slide the lowest sections down another couple of inches. Avoiding grit in the first place is best for sliding parts.

    This won’t be of any help if you do a lot of low-level shooting in gritty or muddy conditions, but then there may be something like tripod condoms to put on the bottoms of the legs to help out.

    The best design for this kind of situation is the Benbo with it’s upside-down leg design, so that the sliding joints don’t have to be shoved into the muck. I don’t know why more tripods don’t utilize this simple alternative. The bad thing about the Benbo is that the knuckle that wears out fast and won’t hold a decent weight outfit.

  • Pingback: A Trip to the Tripod Spa | Induro Blog()

  • Excellent article! Good work 🙂
    Only one criticism – you really should have some “share it” icons on the page(s) to allow readers to easily promote it and spread the word. How to guides like this are priceless, I’m definitely going to share it (manually this time).

  • This is a really helpful tutorial. While I have had to do some minor leg repair and cleaning on my Manfrotto 190CXPRO3 tripod, it was a bit dicey and I learned the hard way, as you mentioned, about aligning my lock levers before reassembly! I also didn’t know how to do many of the other some of the things you mention, for example, the tip about using graphite. I love that you provided the direct link to Bogen-Manfrotto replacement parts. Super well written and illustrated. Thanks!

  • Roger Cicala

    HI Mark,
    Any of the waterproof, silicone gel type have worked well for us. There are a number of different versions made, many of which have specific heat resistant or electrical insulating properties. Vers1lube 332L has worked well for us (it’s probably overkill), as has Novagard G662.

  • Mark Winchester

    When I wandered over to Amazon, I discover a host of lubricants made by Novagard AND several that are a part of it’s Versilube line of lubricants. Is there a PARTICULAR one that would be a good option for keeping my Gitzo tripods in good shape?

  • Jerry L

    Looks great, I’ll have to have a look at this when the sand in my tripod starts to get problematic.

    Think you could do one on ballheads? On my last excursion to the beach, I got some sand in mine and it worked its way inside. Also, I have another head that is way too loose and so needs to be adjusted a bit to be useful.

  • As someone who does coastal area landscapes, I’ve become quite adept at the “getting the sand out strip-down”. Good to have the info on, and source for lubricants for the twist locks and shims. Not sure why I didn’t think to look on Amazon before.

    Wish I was as brave about sensor cleaning, as blowing sand is the bane of my life and will only become a non-issue when I figure out a way to change lenses in some protected way. Or give up changing lenses in the field.

    Have thought about using an old film “changing bag” but not sure if it will really solve the issue.

  • Roger Cicala
  • ShooterMcGavin

    I’d love to see an article like this detailing the specifics of how you clean the elements of the lenses that come back from rental. I’m terrified of touching the bulbous front element on my 14-24, lest I molest the coating somehow.

  • This is an incredibly useful article. I’ve had my tripod parked in a corner of the house for a couple months now after taking it out on a safari. Every movement results in a gritty feeling. This is just the thing to encourage me to get going.

    If only I could figure out now how to get the grit off the ball in the ball head.

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