crashed my mavic pretty hard into a tree branch, not a catastrophic crash but it hit the gimbal side first. the drone flies totally fine but now the gimbal slowly drifts left during flight and the horizon isnt level anymore. the gimbal does its startup calibration thing and it looks okay at first but then over like 30 seconds it just slowly tilts. ive recalibrated it through the app probably four times now.

my question is basically how do i tell if its the ribbon cable vs the actual gimbal motor. i can see the ribbon isnt visibly torn or anything but i know those things can have internal breaks you cant see. the gimbal motor itself feels okay when i move it manually, no grinding or anything. is there a way to test this without just throwing parts at it

ribbon cables on the mavic gimbals are notorious for internal fractures right at the fold point, you genuinely cannot see the break without a microscope sometimes. the slow drift you're describing sounds more like the IMU in the gimbal is getting bad data though ? if the ribbon is intermittently failing the feedback loop the gimbal motor just gets confused and slowly wanders trying to correct for a position it can never verify. i'd honestly try a replacement ribbon first, they're like eight bucks on aliexpress for the mavic ones, way cheaper than finding out the hard way its not the motor. if you replace the ribbon and it still does it then yeah probably a damaged gimbal motor coil or the ball dampers are messed up from the impact and its feeding bad vibration data to the stabilization.

had basically the same thing happen, turned out to be the damper balls were cracked. really easy to miss because they look fine until you actually squeeze them. DJI sells replacements but the third party ones from amazon worked fine for me and were like a third the price. worth checking those before anything else tbh since its a two minute fix if thats the issue