More on the Arri adventure.

Arri adventure? Where did that come from…?

Thing is though, I have had a bit of a time getting my new Arri Follow Focus 5 (FF5) together. I finally received the last piece yesterday!!!

Lets backup a bit. I told you before of how I’d received my FF5 and had immediately felt a problem with the gears. Well that turned out to be just the beginning of the story.

But before I tell you what else happened, let me say that Abel Cine and Arri have been very nice and helpful and I haven’t had any trouble with them.

So, I sent back my first FF5 base, and waited for a new one. That took quite a while. I’m not entirely happy that I had to send the first one back before they’d order the second. If I’d been insistant about it perhaps they’d have ordered it first, which would have shaved several weeks off this whole process. Anyway, I was away when the new FF5 base arrived and when I got home, on Monday, I opened it up, all excited that it was all finally done…. and discovered a small ding on one of the knob sockets.

At first I was going to ignore it. After all, it was purely cosmetic, probably as a result of the FF5 base being dropped at some point, and I’m sure this Follow focus will be beat up quite a bit and dropped a few more times as soon as it’s seen battle. But then I stuck a knob into the socket, and discovered that there was a small burr on the inside of the socket as a result of the drop, and it was causing the knob to get stuck in the base. After trying to attach and detach a knob a few times I realized I was putting rather bad scratches in the shank of the knob and stopped.

What to do? I could easily fix the problem with a little filing, but I didn’t really want to do that to a brand new $2200 component. So I called Arri.

Well, a few emails, an incredulous Abel Cine rep asking if I really needed a third one, and overnight shipping later, here I was with a new FF5 base and a new Knob to replace the scratched one…. Only there’d been a mixup and I’d been sent the wrong knob. So, with a few more emails, an amazing effort by Kevin at Arri to pull a knob off another order, and more FedEx, I now had a new knob that was the right one.

This was now Wednesday. And it would have been all sunshine and daises except that this new knob made rather bad scratching noises. So I sent that back for another replacement.

Unfortunately, at this point I’d exhausted the supply of knobs in the country, so that took a while.

And now, Two weeks after I originally opened the second FF5 base, I have Knob number three and the FF5 is complete. Tomorrow I’ll be mailing the Scratched knob back to Arri and that will be the end of it.

This hasn’t turned me off Arri though. I’m looking at getting a MB-20 or MB-29 from them soon.

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