It is always a sick feeling in the gut when a drone goes down.
This time it was an unseen branch, a thin and leafless thing that reached well out from the tree, unseen until it was too late. Unseen by the drone’s obstacle avoidance system as well.
I crashed the drone at Panther Falls while enjoying a waterfall day in Southern Washington. A place deep in the trees where a drone pilot is advised to exercise caution. I did, and crashed it anyway.
I was very lucky in that the drone landed where I could get to it, not above some cliff, and not in the water. I think of the places I could have crashed it this morning, soaring cliffs, pools of rushing water, and heavy forest. The terrian I was flying over offered vastly more places the drone could have crashed where getting it back would have been impossible.
As it was it only took a quick and relatively safe scramble down a slope to get it back.
The damage was light, and much less than I feared when after watching the drone tumble and bounce. I despaired when I saw the gimbal hanging askew, but further investigation revealed it was just a damaged mounting and the camera and gimbal still worked, mostly. I wedged it back into place and flew again, if rather limited in what I could shoot as I could not move the gimbal properly.
Back in Portland I tackled the problem of getting a drone back in the air before we left for Alaska. Either repair this drone, or buy an alternate. Checking around I found that the DJI Mini 4 was basically no longer available, retailers that had once carried it no longer did so, nothing was available locally on-the-shelf.
That left repair… The parts did seem to be available and several videos laid out the process of replacing the elastomeric mounts for the gimbals. The repair was not quick and simple, but not too bad for a skilled tech such as myself.
Checking online the needed parts turned out to be available from multiple vendors. I suspect I am not the first to discover this feature of the design. But, I do need them fast, we fly on to Cordova in a few days and I truly wanted the drone flyable.
Setting up an order on Amazon I click through to place order… Seven days?!? I need the parts as fast as possible. Oh… I still have the delivery address set for Hawaiʻi. Change the address to the Portland house, and the delivery time becomes next day! For a couple bucks more I can even specify next day before 11am. A pointed difference between mainland and island life.
Sure enough the parts arrived on-time, a Fed-Ex truck stopping to deposit a small padded envelope on the front porch. Before the parts had arrived I had started the process, watching the video and dismantling the front of the drone to remove the damaged mounts.
The only real challenge was finding the necessary tools in my father’s workshop. The shop was well set up for home repair and woodworking, had everything you would want for carving cedar. Drone repair? Not so much, I should have ordered the tools as well. After looking everywhere I located a jeweler’s flat screwdriver that fit into the tiny torx heads well enough to do the job.
Half an hour later… Done. A test flight in the back yard showed that everything was working perfectly.
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