redrock micro arm report
 

I bought a noga arm for my monitor and just love the thing. When i expanded to a second monitor and some extra gear i decided to buy some more noga arms. The model i had bought before was backordered, and i found the redrock 4" micro arm-long for almost half the price.

So I had a friend in the states buy two of them from b&h and mail them to me.

Its weird. They look almost identical to the noga arm, but they behave very differently. The movement of the ends on the redrock is not always smooth. Its like they get stuck or wedged into the ends. When adjusting a monitor on the redrock arm, its not uncommon for me to have to give it a hard jerk to free the ends. Once they are loosened up they are basically ok, but can easily get re-stuck in a random position and require more jerking around to free up. Its really awkward when you are trying to adjust an expensive monitor to have to use brute force.

It feels like I'm not loosening the units enough, but thats not it at all. The redrock arm only has a few rotations from "fully clamped down" to "the handle just unscrewed and fell off". I've had the handle come off in my hand (so clearly it was loose enough) but I'd still have to use force to "unlock" the arm.

It would seem like I got a bum unit... but i got TWO of them, and both behave identically.

The redrock arms work... and are $70 instead of $120, so if you dont plan to readjust your arm frequently, the savings could be worth the hassle. It would cost me a fortune to return them to the states, so I'm keeping mine... and experimenting with ways to loosen up the motion. If something works, i'll holler. cheers!

have encountered similar problems with other products; what seems to work best is run out to your garage, and smear some lithium grease on the ball joints, then work them around to smoothe out the articulation action a bit.

any auto shop or garage should have some, i lube all my rig gear with it, especially after working it over a bit i find the motion is really smoothed out.