Fixing a dislocated Manfrotto 190CXPRO3 Tripod Leg

I was ready to shoot the sunrise in Panglao Island in Bohol, Philippines.  But.. when I was about to setup my Manfrotto 190CXPRO3 Carbon Fiber tripod, the tripod legs broke into several pieces...  Arrgghh... instead of shooting the rising sun, i had to spend some time figuring out what happened, and picking up pieces of my tripod, and luckily I was still able to find the tiny parts of my broken tripod on the beach sand... (imagine looking for parts that I don't even know existed just using a tiny flash light because it was still dark... I just saw them and thought that they were part of my tripod and picked them up... Wheww...) Anyway, it looks like the plastic part in the figure below, but much tinier on the sand...  anyway, now you know that the 190CXPRO3 has this part, it should be a bit easier for you, in case the same accident happens to you.

Now that I found the broken parts, I had to assemble them together in order to use them, I had to figure it out quickly, but after I assembled them, I noticed that I didn't put them back the way it should be... Ouch!

The screw holding the sections of the tripod leg needed a hex type screw driver... Oh Boy... To cut it short, my tripod leg had misaligned joints for almost 2 months.  (ok, I was too lazy to look for and bring it back to the store where I bought it since I bought during a trade show)

I was about to give up, and I suddenly thought of giving my Swiss Knife's Flat (Slotted) Head screw driver a try and it Work! It fits perfectly into the screw driver slot and allowed me to loosen the screw and get the job done.  This is just an idea of how to work with a Hex type screw, you could use another Flat head screwdriver that fits the slot of the screw.

Putting back the legs into place is easy once you know what should go where, here are some tips...

The plastic part above is called "R190,616" by Manfrotto (you can find the190CXPRO3 Part List here), it is used for locking the leg and preventing it from totally slipping through when you extend it.  Therefore it goes on top of the leg, fit it into the hole on the side of the leg, see Fig. A and Fig. B.

Insert the lower tube(leg) into the upper tube(leg), See Fig. D.  Take note that there is a protruding line inside the tube, see Fig. C.  Insert the lower leg with the slot formed by the two plastic locking mechanism, see Fig. B, using the protruding line as a guide.

Before tightening the screws, make sure that the locking latches shown below are aligned with each other.

That's it, I hope this tutorial on how to fix a Manfrotto 190CXPRO3 Tripod helps.