F450 Flamewheel/TBS Discovery carbon fibre arms

timhills

Junior Member
Hi everyone, please forgive me as this is the first time I've ever posted on a forum. I thought it only right that it should be at such a great site like Flitetests.

Anyway, to get on to the topic, I have built my mulitrotor, it's been tried and tested for several months and is working great. It's a deadcat, TBS Discovery style quad with mainly HK components such as motors, esc's, batteries, and their APM 2.5 variant with APM voltage sensor, telemetry module and GPS. Suffice to say, it works really well. I think "dialled" is the right word! :) Take a look at the photos below. (By the way, the carbon fibre gimbal on the front was made by me, I'm very proud of it!)

You can see from the photos the I'm using flamewheel F450 style arms, which work really well but to my mind they're a bit heavy and I think we can do better; to get longer flight times and more a responsive feel. I've had a fairly hard look at the usual places on the internet for replacement arms and have found these from AerialMob which look great, but to my mind are SO much money, prohibitively so. I was hoping that someone could point me in the right direction for a cheaper alternative?

Thanks for the help in advance.

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DDSFlyer

Senior Member
Nice looking quad! Wanna start selling that gimbal? HK sells those arms or their version of them don't they? I have that layout on my future build list, getting a gimbal like that on it would put the icing on the cake!
 

timhills

Junior Member
Beautiful copter. Welcome to Flitetest!

Not sure if these will work and shipping would probably be hell but:
http://www.altitudehobbies.com/iflight-frame-replacement-parts

I can find similar arms on HobbyKing but for 550s and 650 size copters.

Thanks for the reply and kind comment! I can get that type of spare from Hobbyking or my local hobby shop, thanks for looking. What I'm really looking for is a conversion kit to swap them to hollow tubed carbon fibre. Not only will they look good but massively reduce the weight in the air!

Welcome Tim.

And nice job! Would love to see clearer pics of the gimbal.

Thanks. When I get home tonight I will create another thread with pics and possibly a video of it working.

Nice looking quad! Wanna start selling that gimbal? HK sells those arms or their version of them don't they? I have that layout on my future build list, getting a gimbal like that on it would put the icing on the cake!

I'd love to start selling them, there must be a market for them?! The problem is it took me about 4 hours with a Dremel and a sheet of 1mm carbon fibre to make, making it cost prohibitive, unless anyone has a laser cutter they could send me ;). On the new thread I'll post a PDF with plans for how to cut. Thanks.