I love RRS! I'm in photography and have tons of stuff from them. But not the tripods. I bought Gitzo carbon tripods before RRS got into the tripod business and great tripods last forever if taken care of.
I also don't use the RRS ball head. I use the Arca Swiss Monoball Z1. I had the RRS but the Arca Swiss works better better for me. It uses an aspherical ball that locks up really well, and smooth too. It has a 130lb capacity as well. I do use the RRS clamp on it (better clamp).
Matter of fact, just today I thought about mating my rifles to a tripod. No problem! Went into my RRS drawer and pulled out some old stuff. It worked! I installed a $55 RRS universal lens plate on my KRG Bravo rimfire and presto. Rifle on a tripod, all gratis
! First time ever. And of course, started playing with it and was immediately reminded of something I learned a long time ago.
Big, long,heavy things (big telephoto lenses and rifles) don't play very well on ball heads. That's why in photography we don't use ball heads with teles. We use gimbal heads. Wait! I have one of those too. SO, I put it on and presto again
! Rifle on a gimbal. Now, that works perfectly for may reasons. There is one catch, gimbals have no cant adjustment. So, you need a tripod that can use a separate leveling head (expensive but cheap in this PR biz). or if you have time adjust the legs on the tripod for level.
One real advantage of gimbal heads is that the balance of the equipment is not an issue. Both the azimuth and elevation knobs are beefy and have excellent adjustable friction locks that will keep the equipment steady in any position yet fluid at the same time. No need to crank them down and lock the movements. Ball heads don't do that very well at all.
Here's two pictures I took this morning, both ball and gimbal. Notice that in the second picture the rifle is pointed up. But it's NOT locked. I can move it in any direction with two fingers. The gimbal head is adjusted to just the right amount of friction on both axes to make it very steady in any position, not loose, yet smooooth and fluid to move around. By the way, that's the wrong tripod for this business. I just happened to have it handy. For this I will use my BIG carbon tripod.
