Atlas vs Clone Knockoffs

I have the Green Blob QD Atlas knock off ($40), and ended up putting a 5/16" lock washer inside the area inside the cavity under the knurled knob used to tighten the assembly. Fits perfectly and works great. No more loosening all the time. If I swivel it back and forth ten times will it come loose? Yes. But only comes a little loose when intentionally trying to make it come loose. I've seen videos where someone used a few O-rings in the same area but that didn't work for me. 
Mike

"Centercut"I have the Green Blob QD Atlas knock off ($40), and ended up putting a 5/16" lock washer inside the area inside the cavity under the knurled knob used to tighten the assembly. Fits perfectly and works great. No more loosening all the time. If I swivel it back and forth ten times will it come loose? Yes. But only comes a little loose when intentionally trying to make it come loose. I've seen videos where someone used a few O-rings in the same area but that didn't work for me. 
Mike

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If mine ever comes loose I’ll try the lock washer trick with the loc tite but so far it has been staying tight.

Regarding the Atlas clone and the problem of the tensioning knob loosening up or tightening up when panning left and right, I found what seems to be a great solution. Take the tensioning knob off, remove the flat washer that is under it, put a dozen (12) 3mm ball bearings in there where the flat washer was, and then screw the tensioning knob back on. I did this before I even greased anything on mine and the tensioning knob never loosens up or tightens up -- it just stays tensioned where I set it. To put it another way, when I pan left or right, the tensioning knob always moves with the panning. I can't take credit for this idea. I found it as a comment that someone left for a youtube video on fixing these things. I hope this helps someone.

grungy

I got my atlas clone working exactly like I want it to by doing 2 mods. The first mod is in my previous post about putting a dozen (12) 3mm ball bearings under the tension knob. The second mod is the following:

Take out all metal flat washers (won't need those anymore). Take out the spring (won't need that anymore). Take out the concave metal washer (won't need that anymore). Wipe all the grease off of everything except the grease you will need to have on the ball bearings (just to keep them from falling out if you need to take your tension knob off and don't want the bearings all falling out on the floor). Also probably a good idea to squirt grease into the part of the bipod that holds on to the rail -- you squirt grease into where the main pivot bolt sticks out (the bolt that the tension knob screws onto at the other end). But do get rid of all the rest of the grease on that bolt.

Now buy one of these shower heads (I suppose the version of this without the toggle shut off switch would be cheaper). These are the same shower heads we had in the barracks in navy boot camp in 1975. You should be able to buy them at Lowes or Home Depot or maybe even Walmart.



I happened to have two of these laying around in my garage that were both about 20 years old and no longer used.

So now you just take out the rubber part that the ball of this pivoting shower head is sealing against. CRAM this rubber part into where the concave washer used to be. It will take lots of cramming with your finger nails from all sides to get it to stay in there and to see that the same amount of rubber is sticking out evenly all around. Now just put the main bolt down through the rubber all the way to where the tension knob screws onto it and screw on the tension knob. Done!

After doing this, you will never have metal to metal grinding or scraping. You won't be able to totally lock the pan or cant in place (I never want to do that). If you ever do have metal to metal locking or grinding or scraping, then I guess you could take the tension knob off and remove the main bolt and put an o-ring around the bolt and put it back together. The main idea here is that you are just cramming rubber in there and letting the convex part of the bolt that used to ride on a metal concave washer now ride on tightly packed dry rubber -- don't grease it. You just want dry metal contacting hard-packed dry rubber. Works great for me.

I hope this helps someone. I also hope it works for you and doesn't just end up wasting the money you spent for the shower head. I've been using my atlas clone bipod like this for a couple of weeks now and I love it.

Now that I think of it, if you happen to have a lot of assorted sized o-rings handy, you could just skip the shower head rubber pivot and try putting a bunch of assorted o-rings in there. I haven't tried that, but it might work just as well.

I just now thought of another simple "packed rubber" solution that might work well (haven't tried it myself -- don't need to since the original shower head rubber part works so well). Instead of the shower head rubber part, just see what kind of flat rubber washers you can find at the hardware store and stack them onto the pivot bolt in place of where the original metal concave washer was. It all boils down to the same thing generally. You don't need a spring or metal washers to make this bipod work the way I like a bipod to work.

Just another grungy idea.