Five months ago I went onto my local photography forum looking for a used Manfrotto 501HDV video head. There weren't many available, and I was desperate because it was only 5 days away from shooting.
So just 2 days before my school assignment, a guy called me to say that he had one for sale. It wasn't in particularly good cosmetic condition, but worked very well nonetheless. He wanted like 20 bucks more than the normal second hand price, but to sweeten the deal, he said he'd provide a spoilt carbon fibre video tripod for free. The moment I heard "carbon fibre", I thought it wouldn't be too bad anyway, and confirmed the purchase.
I went over to the guy's place and whatdaya know, he pulled out this huge hunk of a tripod. The Manfrotto 540ART tripod. Turns out the legs weren't able to be locked at that point in time and he was a video professional with other sturdier legs anyway. And a family man too, which was probably why he was so nice to this 18 year old anyway. We talked a bit and I walked off with the head and the video tripod (with a working half bowl adapter).
Five months later, I went to a local repair shop who is the sole agent for Manfrotto products here, and asked for it to be repaired. The guy gave a puzzled look because he hadn't seen such an old tripod before, but he said he'd try anyway. I was phoned the next day to the shop, and what do you know, the repairman said all he did was opened up the mechanism, tightened a few screws, and got it up to about 90% working order (one lower leg still can't hold very well, so I can't extend it all the way up without caution).
I checked the prices online and apparently they were going for about 1.8k USD back in the day. And.. Best of all, I got the tripod and repair done... for free! 
| HTTP response: 400 | MIME changed to 'text/html' |
| HTTP response: 400 | MIME changed to 'text/html' |
| 
