Gentlemen;
Forgive me for resurrecting this almost year old thread. I found some great information on here that will help me with a project I will soon be undertaking and I'd like to share a few things with regards to folding props.
I own several drones - at one time I had 4 (3 P3 Standards and one P3P). I recently sold one of my standards and was planning on buying a Mavic until the "Phavic" mod caught my eye (
Experience with phavic? ). One of the standards I own was a slightly abused P3S that had cracked motor mounts. I repaired this bird and was planning to sell it until I came across the Phavic. I decided I was going to try this mod with the hopes that I could get a slightly larger Mavic equivalent at a fraction of the price.
Now before some of you start flaming me in comparing a P3S with a Mavic, its more about my needs than performance. Sure, I know a Mavic is a far superior machine when compared to the P3S. What I need is something that could be be easily carried in a backpack and set up very quickly. I'm currently doing a lot of city 107 work (part time, Dronebase and some other stuff) and don't feel like lugging around my P3P all the time. The Phavic seems to the perfect answer to some of the work I've been doing while saving me $1000+!
So in planning my mod I started looking at folding props, the pros and con and decided to see if they could work with my plans.
I purchased a set a STO Metal Foldable Propellers. I assembled them and put them on the P3S I am planning to do the Phavic mod on. Well I test flew them today and came up with the following results/ conclusions;
1. When assembling them, they can't be too loose or too tight. They should be stiff enough so some mild pressure needs to be applied for them to open them (obviously that's their purpose)
2. When I started up the drone, there was some wobble/ vibration until centrifugal force took over and the propellers behaved as they were designed to.
3. I felt no real adverse conditions during flight although I did not take the drone over 20 mph. I don't fly DJI drones like an F-16!!!
4. I ran the batteries down to 15% - that only gave me about 15 minutes of flight time. The "annunciator page" on DJI GO showed that I have about a minute of flight time left. NOTE: as I stated earlier, this drone was repaired and I know it has added weight (Aside from reinforcing the motor mount area with Plast Aid, I added the metal reinforcing plates.
Stress cracks under motor
5. The batteries got hot! After shut down I was looking at some of the flight info and I got a hot battery warning. the OAT was 85F at the time of flight.
CONCLUSIONS: I believe folding props do work but as the saying goes "you don't get something for nothing." There mayl be decreased performance and extra maintenance, mainly in the form of continual inspection. Despite this, I think I am going to try these props on my Phanvic mod as the work I will be eventually doing will only require short duration flights. I've attached a video to show how my P3P performed with the folding props. Sorry for the moving camera, it's hard to fly and use an I phone camera at the same time!
EDIT: Sorry folks, having issues uploading the video at this time!