dropped my mavic pretty good into some tall grass a few weeks ago, nothing looked obviously broken but now the gimbal roll axis just kind of... sags. like it tries to stabilize but theres this constant offset, maybe 4 or 5 degrees, and it drifts a bit when panning. ive done the gimbal calibration like three times through the app and it always completes successfully but the footage still looks crooked.

im guessing either the ribbon cable got stressed or one of the tiny motors in the gimbal took a hit. i opened it up once before on an older phantom for a different reason so im not totally clueless but the mavic gimbal looks way more fiddly. anyone actually repaired one of these themselves or is it a send-it-back-to-dji situation. replacement gimbal units on aliexpress are like 60-80 bucks which seems almost worth it just to not deal with dji support

yeah the ribbon cable is almost always the issue after a grass or soft surface crash, which sounds counterintuitive but the way the gimbal flexes on sudden stops can stress those cables even when nothing else breaks. theres a specific fold point that tends to crack internally so it still looks fine visually. if you have steady hands its not that hard to replace, just tedious. i did mine on a kitchen table with a pair of tweezers and a lot of patience. the aliexpress cables are hit or miss quality wise so try to find one from a seller with decent reviews and order two because youll probably mess up the first install

tbh if the gimbal motor itself is damaged id just get the full replacement unit off aliexpress rather than trying to rewind or source individual motors for it. ive seen people attempt gimbal motor repairs and it almost never goes well, the tolerances are just too tight. the 60-80 dollar units work fine in my experience, had one on my air for almost a year now with no issues. just make sure you match the exact model number because there are a few variants and they look identical until you try to plug them in