Warning to all X5 owners

Drone Doctor - the guys from First Person View run it and they are DJI authorised repairers (their techs have been trained by DJI in Shenzhen)
 
Mine is also broken friday 13th. Any suggestions for reliable repair service in Germany?

Thank you.
I contacted DJI in the Netherlands, they organized UPS express pick up in Cyprus. Some few days later i received the Invoice. To repair the yaw shaft approx 180 Euro included the shipping cost! Not bad at all I see DJI have service center in Germany. Contact them and I am sure they advise and help you out! I am very happy wiyh the DJI service so far!
 

Same as myself, I should have mine back Tuesday this week, applied for RMA on 17th so 2 weeks exactly if it turns up this week. Payment by papal. Absolutely faultless. TBH, this has restored some faith!

Still cost me another £2500 though, bought a spare PRO in the mean time for EpicTV in France... absolute bargain.
 


Brand new unit returned today.
 
Reactions: slim.slamma
Looked thru this post and decided to give my own experience. Had a friend fly my Pro a few weeks ago. He had one of the first versions of the Inspire with the X3. He has lots of hours and I didn't think twice about letting him fly it. I had adjusted the expo and when he came in he allowed the copter to drift long and it hit some branches on a willow tree. The props got tangled up and the copter slowly fell to the ground from about 2 feet. Wish I had reached out and tried to catch but the spinning props discouraged me. It hit perfectly flat upside down. Broke two props and after inspection I notice the yaw gimble was misaligned. Also broke the gimbal mount at the weakest points. I think the gimbal is very weak at the yaw motor because of the amount of weight associated with the X5. Of course there are many weak points but usually the weakest one breaks first. Not sure if there is anything that can be done short of not crashing. Be nice if someone made a "gimbal saver" like for the P3. Of course if the yaw gimbal motor is saved then something else in the chain will break. Bottom line, these machines aren't made to crash. The gimbal mount coast $100 "B&H" and the gimbal yaw motor had to go back to DJI for repair/replacement. Cost was $315 and that included shipping both ways. Lots of bad press about DJI repair service. I called them about getting the repair service started and so far I"m happy. They sent a pick up ticket for UPS and once they received it I got an email within 24 hours with the repair ticket. Just paid for it so we will now see how long it takes to get it fixed. They tell me 1 to 2 weeks.
 
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Your lucky they helped you out. I have one being sent to me with the broken yaw mount and they said no more repairs to the owner.
 
Obviously I'm new to this forum so I know there are a lot of people out there with more history to pull from. I think that DJI would be making a serious mistake by not offering to fix a gimbal motor that cost a fraction in parts and instead make everyone spend $1700 on a new gimbal/camera. Makes no business sense at all. I could see a redesign of the mounts and connectors based on the amount of breakage. The X5 is fairly new compared to the X3 and I'm sure by now DJI has a pretty good handle on the amount of repairs based on the number sold. They might be working on a redesign now. After all, the Inspire has gone thru many upgrades during it's life span. But it's only a guess on my part. You say that you have one being sent to you. Do you repair gimbals? Maybe I'm miss reading your post. Thanks
 
Just wanted everyone to know that DJI has repaired the gimbal and UPS has it now. That only took three working days to get it fixed. That's great repair service in anyone's book.
 
Having experienced a crash with the X5 and seeing other incidents online, this is almost always the point where the X5 removes itself from the craft. It is definitely due to the very thin amount of material that is supporting that amount of weight.
 
Brand new X5. I noticed the camera wasn't spinning normally on initializing. Closer inspection I noticed what appeared to be rubbing. I took apart only what you see in hopes that something just came loose and stopped where you see. I small washer seemed to be disintegrated. I'm dead in the water and have a job soon. any suggestions? Is this a warranty item? No I did not "hard land"
 

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how new and purchased directly from DJI?

If you've got flight logs which show you've never used it, or that it's never been crashed - you may have a defensible position for warranty repair, but that will consume valuable time getting that past DJI.

Only conceivable reason I can tender for it being like that is if you had it in a landing mode case with the X5 attached and the case took some sort of impact.

I'd say get in touch with them and organise a paid repair ASAP because realistically any other course of action will be very time consuming, time which you do't have unfortunately.
These gimbals are just too fragile
 
Reactions: Bossman
Thank you for this post. I bought my Inspire 1 Pro 2 weeks ago and noticed the gimbal rubbing during initialization. Again no hard landings or travel with the camera attached. In short I just dropped it off at Unique Photo the originating retailer for Warranty Repair. Nobody challenged me at the store, but I was as adamant that this is a 2 week old drone that first sipped with a bad battery. I had to buy a new battery because I couldn't wait die to a trip. Now I just purchased an X3 for another impending trip and as a backup camera. Only positive here is that I will eventually have a great OSMO setup. Do yo suggest that I call DJI direct anyway?
 
OK so from the sounds of it, the gimbal at least may have been recycled and re-sold as new, where that occurred is impossible to say and just speculation.

I'd be happy the retailer has accepted it back for warranty repair and leave it at that, however when I was working at a store it wasn't uncommon for warranty repair items to come back with an invoice for the the repairs and then the battle began.
 

I have just had a catastrophic failure with my X5 gimbal. I have had no accidents while flying the Inspire One or heavy landings. What happened in my case was after a firmware upgrade and on rebooting the Inspire I had a judder occur in the Gimbal.

After going through a number of steps to downgrade firmware and reapply the latest firmware and all the while the juddering occurring, to my horror and surprise a small metal fragment dropped out of the motor assembly. My assumption rightly or wrongly is that the juddering has cause some degree of metal fatigue. I contacted DJI China as I am in the Oceania Region for support (Australia), but have yet to hear back from them. Given the problem appears to be structural I am not sure how the support staff will treat this problem. I am hopeful they will simply replace the defective item with a complete new one.
 
I had a situation with my Inspire 1 pro V2 whilst flying inside an old Lime Kiln and momentarily lost radio signal control. The aircraft slowly struck a wall with the props and dropped to the ground which was about 1 m. The UC was up so it fell on to the gimbal. Yes you guessed it - it broke the upper gimbal motor cast allow mounting plate. When I picked it up the X5 was hanging lose. Stripped it down and the thin cast alloy was able to be be repaired with Molecular Metal and all was looking good. However the ribon cable was torn. So put my hand in my pocket and purchased a new X5 at £1400. I will keep the 3 week older X5 until I can find a replacement ribbon cable. Lessen learnt which is the Inspire needs to be looked after carefully because it will not take any form of punishment with my F550 and other aircraft take. I suspect the constant fitting and removal with the X5 weakened the cast alloy mounting plate and strongly recommend if you have difficulty in removing the X5 just use the supplied screw driver to prise the X5 away and DONT pull on the whole gimbal.
 
Also had a small crash with I1 v2.0 and X5 gimbal and it cracked the YAW motor mount.
Yaw motor was crooked, but i managed to straighten it and then added some epoxy glue to strengthen the area around cracks.
Couple of photos of cracks and after epoxy glue - https://goo.gl/photos/69JVzv8xzJ9RLT6g7
Seems to hold for 5 flights now.

But i have a problem, after reassembly of the yaw motor, X5 will boot up 45 degrees to the left from center.
See video -
 
Dont have the solution other than fly camera in free mode. It's only FPV mode that's affected.
 

I think your assumptions about poor piloting skills are responsible for damaged X5 gimbals are ill founded.
I believe there is now enough information within this forum alone to suggest the build quality or the materials (the alloys) they use are not fit for purpose or built as robust as it should be.

My experience has been quite different in so far as I have had no impacts of any sort, but my gimbal went into a juddering fit after a firmware upgrade. As a consequent of that I believe that metal fatigue has occurred as a small shard of metal dropped out of the X Axis motor assembly. Of course it could be the other way around. That is the metal broke away first causing the gimbal to judder, but either way something appears not to be quite right with the structural quality of the X5 gimbal. Eventually the whole motor assembly became loose so the gimbal has been returned to DJI via my supplier. I have been in awe of DJI's technology and product range, but I feel the X5 gimbal is showing signs of weakness and DJI should have a closer inspection and evaluation of build quality of what is otherwise a great piece of design and engineering that needs to be rebuilt in a more robust package.