Hello Andre
I got my mule 3 months ago but due to extreme weather (1 meter snow in february) and rain in march it has seen very little airtime. I maidened it when there was snow so i used the skis. Worked brilliant ! Now the snow has been packed so it is more like ice than snow. Turns out the ski's are totaly wrongly constructed. If you look at the mount (on the ski) there is a gap between the ski and the black plastic mount. So in case of a hard landing it will always shatter the mount but possibly save the ski or the wing mount. I will redesign this so it has a flexible mount instead. An idea i have is to use the "fat" plastic that you can find in plastic food containers that you can use in microvave. It is flexible and it dosnt get brittle in cold. So my idea is to remove the plastic mount from the ski and make a "spring" similar to the steel springs in trucks that is just a couple of stripes of that fat plastic. I would mount it to the steel axel using a piece of wood with a hole drilled in. I would glue the small wood (or plastic) block to the springs. The springs would be screwed to the skis with the original screws. This would give a bit of flex on each landing i hope. Since the ski's themself are very brittle too. It is wrong plastic for ski's also. It should be the "fat" type that is a bit flexible. I have broken two ski mounts on landings on ice. I switched the back skis for wheels. The only thing that happend then was i broke the front ski mount also. So now im all "wheels" on the ice. Time to start experimenting with the mounts. I dont want to order them from china. Damn the snow is gone before they get here. Usually takes like 30 days to Sweden.
Did you FPV the mule yet ? I maidend it with FPV yesterday and today i added the go pro on it. Amazing it doesnt feel like there is a camera mounted on it
. I mounted it on top of the fuselage infront of the wing using hot glue to attach a old used go pro mount. I have the FPV camera on the FPV pod. I dont want to have the go pro on the pod. Very stable platform.
My mule is totaly stock. I think the motors where upgraded by HK tho so now they are DT 900 or something like that. Even the propps are the ones that came with the mule. So far i havent managed to break them upon landing. The landings have been pretty good. But aparently not good enough for the ski's. I know other props are more efficient but ill wait with switching them until i break the ones that are on now. I will switch to two bladed props.
FPV equipment i got is a small security camera, G OSD 3, fatshark 250mW 5.8 GHz with cloverleaf antennas. I use fatshark goggels also. I would like to have a groundstation but i dont have one yet. The flight battery i have used so far is 2200 mAh, 2700mAh and a 850 mAh for the VTX. Edit: i purchased two 4000 mAh 3S batteries but i havent used them yet. I wanted to get a feel how it handles with the smaller ones first. With the 2200 mAh and no FPV equipment it glides pretty well.
Other FPV craft: Popwing 900 mm, Skyscout (Easystar 2) and well the phantom 1.1.1. Most boring of them all is the phantom. So incredibly slow and messes up the video signal totaly so no range on it either.
Look forward to hear more about your Skymule escapades
Carolos Rex
Northern Sweden near arctic circle