Rogue Flashbender affecting ETTL connection. What to do?

I have been doing a lot of volunteer stuff recently using my large Rogue Flashbender and I like it. I have been using one of two 580 EX IIs in ETTL mode and a 5D MkIII. It's not the usual problem of the Flashbender pulling the head of the flash down--I am careful to have the flash head pointed up and the FB secured with the velcro strap fairly low. What happens is I chimp and the last shot is totally blown out. The speedlight screen reads TLL. None of the controls work on the flash. When it first happened, I turned the flash off and on but that didn't work. I removed the flash and put it back on and that usually didn't work, either. What I finally have started doing is gently twisting the base of the flash in the hotshoe. That will usually give me back ETTL for a while. Obviously, the connector pins have been misaligned or something. I do carry the camera and flash on a sling strap while cradling the camera with my fingers.

Oh, BTW, this only happens with the Flashbender attached. And it happens with both speedlights.

I have a couple of concerns. One is that when it goes into TTL it must be using full flash power to totally blow out my shots. That can't be good, can it? Does it shorten the life of the flash or anything bad like that?

Another concern is that I am losing shots. I don't know when this is going to happen but it is happening a couple times an hour now.

So, what do I do? Give up on the Flashbender? I really like using it for the type of shooting that I am doing. Is something too loose on the hotshoe or the locking mechanism on the flash? Anybody had this problem?

Thats the classic indicator that you are having connection issues between camera and flash. That could be because the weight of your flashbender is causing the hotshoe connection to be strsined somehow. Dont worry its not damaging your flash, but its annoying. That its happening with 2 flashes makes me think the hotshe of the camera might be a issue. Does this hapen more on vertical shots than horizontal?

Hmmm. That's an idea. I am usually taking horizontal shots with the occasional vertical. Maybe that's when the intermittant problem happens. I'll watch for that next time. Thanks for the idea!