crashed my Mavic Air 2 into a fence post on sunday, wasnt even a hard hit, maybe 15-20kph at most. props are fine, body looks fine, but now the gimbal just hangs limp and doesnt initialise properly. it makes this little grinding noise on startup and then just droops to one side. camera still records fine weirdly enough.

took the gimbal off to have a look and the ribbon cable that runs from the gimbal arm into the body looks slightly kinked, could be that but honestly the kink doesnt look that bad to me. replacement gimbal assemblies are like ?120-150 which is annoying because the rest of the drone is totally unscathed. ive seen some posts about people replacing just the ribbon cable for a few quid but im not sure how involved that actually is or if theres something else i should be checking first.

dont really want to send it to DJI because last time they quoted me more than the repair was worth and just tried to sell me a refurb unit

the ribbon cable replacement is doable but its fiddly, the connectors on those are ZIF type and if you've never done one before theres a real chance you'll damage it more trying. the locking tab is tiny and they break easy. i'd watch a few teardown videos on youtube specific to the Air 2 before you touch anything. that said if the cable is visibly kinked that's almost certainly your problem, those flex cables do not like being bent sharply even once.

the grinding on startup is a bit worrying though, could be something in the yaw or roll motor itself got knocked. if the cable swap doesnt fix it you might be looking at a motor replacement on the gimbal which gets annoying fast.

i snapped a gimbal ribbon on my Mini 2 trying to do this exact repair. just buy the whole assembly tbh. 120 quid sounds like a lot but the time and stress of messing with those tiny connectors isnt worth it unless you do electronics repair regularly. the replacement assemblies usually come with everything preattached anyway so its basically just a swap