so yeah this is embarrassing but i came in a little hot last weekend and the mavic bounced off the ground on a slope and skidded like a foot. foam landing pads probably saved the props but the gimbal has been slowly drifting left ever since, like maybe 3-4 degrees over a 30 second clip which sounds small but its completely unusable for anything serious.

ive done the gimbal calibration in the DJI app like four times and it helps a little but never fully corrects it and then it comes back. physically the gimbal looks fine, no obvious cracks or bent ribbon, roll motor still moves freely. im wondering if one of the IMU sensors in the gimbal arm took a hit or if maybe the ribbon got a tiny internal break thats only showing up under load or something. anyone actually opened one of these up and fixed something like this or is it basically send it in territory.

ive opened up a mavic 2 gimbal before and i will say it is not a fun experience, the ribbon cables are absolutely terrifying to work with and the connectors are basically disposable once you flex them. that said if youre already looking at a repair bill there are some pretty decent teardown guides on youtube that show the IMU board location and a lot of people have fixed exactly this kind of drift by reseating the IMU connector, apparently they come loose in crashes even when everything externally looks fine. whether thats worth attempting vs just sending to a third party repair shop kinda depends how handy you are with tiny stuff. DJI official repair is usually like $150+ just for labor which is rough.

had the same thing on an older Mavic Air, drift after a ding. ended up being the roll motor ribbon had a micro tear that wasnt visible until i used a loupe. DJI wanted almost as much as a refurb unit to fix it so i just bought a used gimbal assembly off ebay for like $40 and swapped the whole thing. not a fun swap but not impossible either if you follow a teardown video carefully and dont rush it.