Although the manual says that the clamp can be removed so that the arm has two 3/8” ends, this is not the case; the threading is firmly glued to the clamp and it can only be removed with special techniques and a lot of brute force. I had two of these arms with the strict need of threading on both sides, so I managed to remove the clamp anyway, but this is something not everybody will be able to do. Maybe the Chinese factory did not understand the instruction from Adam Hall to only glue the thread adapter that is also in place to the clamp and they simply glued both the adapter and the clamp onto the 3/8” threading, but whatever happened this is a gross impediment of the functionality of the arm, at least for me. If you intend to use the arm with the clamp you can be sure it will never come off accidentally.
In the process of removing the ball head from the clamp I was able to remove the oil that was all over the ball and which made it impossible to make the arm hold the specified 3 kg. Maybe that was the good thing of this exercise: I had to take apart the whole arm to find out how to remove the glued-on clamp and that teached me how to restore losing holding power of the unit, also in de future, as other users have mentioned.
Conclusion: this could have been a great product when it was manufactured as intended, but poor execution of the design makes it a big gamble for most buyers. Better to buy the original that this is a rip-off from.
