How to Repair and Clean Your Hunting Tripod

It’s no secret that we produce the best hunting tripods on the market. Outdoorsmans tripods are built to last even in the toughest conditions. While our tripods can take a beating, there is such a thing as too much abuse. Luckily, there are some things you can do to ensure that your OD tripod does, in fact, last a lifetime.

What to do With Dust

First things first, dust is a silent killer. Our tripods and heads are built with extremely tight tolerances, it’s why they function so well. However, the flip side to that coin is that when excessive dust accumulates on your tripod and tripod head, it can cause pretty extensive damage.

Now, I’m not talking about just a little bit of dust from a day of hiking around from glassing point to glassing point. I’m talking about dust that either accumulates over a few years, or the type of dust that coats your entire life after mobbing around dirt roads on your side-by-side.

We see this more often than not when it comes to our Pan Heads, and Pistol Grips. As dust accumulates on these heads, fine particles and grit work their way inside and dry up grease, or cause abrasions on internal pieces of our heads. This will simply cause that head to lose tension, or become sticky or gritty.

Dust can also cause a little bit of damage to our hunting tripods. Dust mainly affects the sears that allow our tripod legs to be splayed out wide as well as the clamps and leg extensions themselves. 

Cover it Up

One of the best ways to prevent dust from accumulating on your gear is to simply cover it up. This is one of the many reasons why I exclusively run our Palisade 90 pack. Those long side pockets almost completely cover Outdoorsmans Tall Tripod and Fluid Head. 

The head does stick out of the top of my pack a bit, but for general hiking around it’s not a problem. When I do need to toss my pack in the back of the truck or side by side, I make sure to cover that head as much as possible. We also sell 500 denier cordura tripod bags, these are great for keeping dust off your gear.

In general, what I like to do is simply wipe the dust off the legs of my tripod with my hand as I fold it up and put it away. This helps prevent gritty particles from lodging themselves inside the leg tubes and causing your legs to stick. 

The Yearly Deep Clean

Then about once or twice a year depending on the state of my gear, I will take the time to deep clean my tripod. This is super easy to do as long as you have some time and a set of Allen wrenches. 

Here’s what you need to clean an OD tripod:

• Q-tips
• Set of Standard Allen Wrenches
• Canned or Compressed Air
• Acetone

The first thing I do is wipe everything down and clean all the exposed dust. Then what I like to do is blow all the dust out of the sears. This is the section of our tripods that you manipulate to get the legs to splay out wider. If need be, if the dust is really bad, I remove the tripod leg and get a Q-tip in there to really get the dust out. 

Next, I disassemble the leg lever and completely clean that assembly; I’m talking leg lever, brass cylinder, and leg clamp. You’ll know when this assembly needs to be cleaned because it will start to become difficult to close that leg lever. A little acetone on a q-tip will go a long way right here. 

That should be all the regular maintenance that your tripod legs should require.

This isn’t a DIY Task

Unfortunately, deep cleaning our tripod heads is the only thing we do not recommend doing on your own. If your head needs to be repaired or cleaned and re-greased, it must be sent to us so we can have our machine shop get it back to brand new condition.

In general, though, you can clean the dust out of some of the nooks and crannies of your head, we just don’t recommend taking them apart. What you will want to do is take that q-tip and acetone to all the seams on your pan head, fluid head, and micro pan head. That will help prevent dust and grit from working their way inside.

If you have our Pistol grip, there is a little more that you can do. In the video below, Blake explains the best way to clean your Pistol Grip:

 Now, in general, any repairs that need to be done to your Outdoorsmans tripod, or head should be completed by our machine shop. Here’s a comprehensive list of our repair pricing.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “I spent a bunch of money on this tripod, why should I have to pay for repairs and maintenance?”

Listen, I get it, $1000.00-$1,200.00 is a decent amount to spend on a tripod setup and we really appreciate the fact that we have so many loyal customers, but the fact of the matter is that these tripods take a beating. They’re made to be in harsh conditions, they’re going to get beat up.

I think about it like my truck – I paid good money for my truck, but things still wear out on it, and I still need to take active measures to maintain the condition of my truck. That’s just the nature of the beast when you have gear that is made to be outside.