Date Added: Thursday 24 February, 2011

by Paul Tierney

I bought this strengthening plate to protect the base plate of my Gitzo 1548 carbon fibre tripod from any possible long term warping. I don\'t honestly know how likely this is, even with a Canon EF 600mm f4L lens attached to the tripod, while both are moved about over sometimes rough terrain, but it seemed to me to be sensible to take a precautionary approach. The plate is beautifully cut and fits like a glove, there\'s that phrase again, to the underside of the tripod base plate. The instructions are very clear, and the necessary tools provided. I have the older model of Gitzo 1548, and in this instance one needs to bore out the old brass bolt from the base plate, and then clean out the threads with one of the two steel bolts provided with the safety plate. The brass bolt comes out cleanly, however, on these older models, there is a locking pin inserted into the brass bolt, and this pin is made of harder metal than the brass bolt. One has to be careful in cleaning out the threads as this pin does not comes out easily, and if one isn\'t careful, it will not only score the steel bolt used to clean out the threads, which isn\'t a problem as it is meant to be sacrificial, but may score the threads in the tripods base plate. This happened to me, although it did not prevent me inserting the second, longer steel bolt, which secures the safety plate to the base plate and accepts the tripod head. It all worked out fine, and this cautionary note should not IMHO stop anyone using this safety plate, but if one used excessive force, without being aware of whether the cleaning steel bolt was square, one could do damage to the tripod base plate. Quite possibly, I should have tried to remove the locking pin earlier and it might then have come out more cleanly. I am very happy with the safety plate, which gives me confidence in using the tripod and lens combo, but I wanted to throw my experience into the pot, so others may benefit from my mistakes.