GOKU1972 said:
next thing on the list p2 props or carbon fibre
Food for thought ...................
From Phantom pilot one.
Let me see if I can explain this to you. The original props that come with the phantom are made of a soft plastic, this is so if you hit something the prop hopefully will not break. As they rotate, and you would need a hi speed camera to see this, they actually begin to flatten out towards their tips, thus losing their pitch angle. Carbon fibre, when its made correctly, has less of this flattening out and keeps it pitch, or bite into the air constant. The same principal can be seen on a constant speed propeller used on small and large propeller aircraft. The pitch or bite is adjustable. So for example on take off you want as much pitch on the blades as possible to pull the aircraft along. Once you hit cruising speed you can lower the pitch or as we pilots call it, feather the props as less pitch is needed. So you can see how this would affect how your phantom flies. If the prop pitch stay constant you need less power to maintain altitude, carry loads or just getting off the ground. So you get more lift from your props with a good quality carbon fibre prop. I am a private pilot and fly a Diamond Star, most of the aircraft is carbon fibre laminate with of course a carbon fibre 3 blade propeller. That's why.
Reply from Phantom pilot 2
The THEORY is sound, but the experience a LARGE number of people have had seems to be that CF props often make the phantom less stable and in the worst cases completely non-flightworthy. Maybe it's because the people manufacturing them aren't building to aerospace standards and may have little or no QC process, completely unlike the parts that are used on your airplane. I also believe that CF props, while ultimately stronger than plastic props, can be less resilient to damage, by which I mean a prop strike may render a CF prop unstable or unpredictable due to compromising the internal structure even if there's little visible damage. There's just so much that can go wrong with a laminate part if you don't know exactly what you're dealing with.
Composite laminates can do amazing things when engineered correctly. But they're also very easy to build cheaply with very little engineering, which results in a "cool looking" part with no performance advantage. When people snap up cheap CF props from low quality manufacturers, they have no idea what they're getting. In contrast, the DJI plastic props are a single isotropic material that behaves very predictably. If you know of a manufacturer who's actually doing it right, and you can see some kind of consistent and quantifiable improvement in performance, then enjoy; but you can't just flat out assume that "CF=BETTER" because it often isn't the case.
(note - I'm not just pulling this all out of my arse, I'm a mechanical engineer and a good deal of my degree focus was on composite materials and turbo machinery)
As a side note, I recently grazed my wife's freshly detailed BMW with the prop of my Phantom. If it had been a carbon fibre prop, that mistake would have cost me several hundred dollars. I do think it's a valid point that a CF prop can do a LOT more damage to person or property than the softer plastic props. Whether that's a worthwhile risk is an individual decision, but when I've seen very few actual experiences that indicate that the performance is significantly better, I see little reason to take that risk at all.
Maybe this is a case of - If it works - don't mess with it - but if you do, I for one will read with interest.
Above is corrected for English spelling :lol: