Flight report from Scorpion Customer on HK2221-8 motor and 60A Heli ESC, By Jeff Kodysz

22.10.2008

The next day was Labor Day, and I headed over to my buddy's house for a cookout, but before I left the house, I made sure I had a few fully charged LiPos and the 450. I needed to change my startup procedure for the 450 a little bit, since I was using the Scorpion governor. Instead of spooling up in Normal mode to center stick (0 pitch at half throttle), I engaged throttle hold, flipped to Idle up 1, and moved the throttle stick to center ) pitch), then flipped throttle hold off and let the ESC's soft-start take care of bringing the speed up. This was the recommended procedure for starting with this governor running. No big deal there, just something new to get used to.

The first flight was a hover test; just a basic shakedown to make sure everything worked correctly, and to see how much flight time I'd get. Again, using my Air Thunder 2200mAh packs, I was getting 6 full minutes to 80% discharge with the old Align motor. With the new Scorpion motor, I hit 7:00 just hovering, and would put back 80%, so surprisingly, I got a bit more time. Subsequent flights were promising. Lots of power available, and no real motor bogging was noticed. Tic-Tocs were much better and I didn't lose altitude during multiples as I did when bogging out the old motor. Flips and rolls were much crisper and cleaner due to the slight increase in headspeed and lack of bogging. I did some pitch pumps and was glad to notice that the heli jumped straight up very quickly when given a burst of positive pitch. The only problem I ran into the whole day was during this flight, when I was introduced to vortex ring phenomenon, and accidentally bounced the heli off its skids. After checking over everything, I was relieved that nothing was bent or broken. Note to self: Don't come straight down too fast!

The governor mode seemed to hold the headspeed well under load, and I didn't really notice any overspeeding when transitioning through 0 pitch or when coming down the backside of loops, but then again, this wasn't ever really a big problem with my 450...more for my 600e and N. The governor / rev-limit mode likewise worked well, and I didn't really notice any brake-induced pulsing of the motor, but that could be attributed to the lack of overspeeding on this little heli. If I had some heavier blades, I might have noticed more, or it could be that there was some, and the ESC just dealt well with it. In any case, there were no surprises and the heli was very well behaved.

After all flights I checked the temperature of the ESC and motor, though I didn't bring my thermometer with me. The motor was barely even warm on the hovering flight and cool to the touch on the rest. The ESC was warm after all flights, but not hot. I don't guess I'm working it very hard. The battery packs were warm, but also not hot and again, were much cooler than they ever were with the Align motor.

All in all, I'm very pleased with the Scorpion HKII-2221-8 motor and Commander Heli 60A ESC. It's a great combination that fits the 450-size helis well, and offers a very good compromise of performance to flight time. If I flew the heli with less attention to proper collective management, I'm sure I could bog the motor, but I'm not looking to do that. In fact, I'd rather have a motor that didn't let me develop poor flying skills and I think the -8 gives the right amount of performance without "coddling" the pilot. It recovers fast enough that if I push a little too far on the collective, the heli lets me know it, but lets me correct for the error without being unforgiving.

The price point of the motor and ESC are very good, especially considering the features that Scorpion has built into them. The quality construction of the motor with its high-temp components and well-thought out design, and the state-of-the-art ESC with it's versatile and useful helicopter specific features, and included easy to use remote programming capability are in my opinion, worth a lot more than Scorpion is charging. Yes, they cost a bit more than a stock replacement motor and ESC, but you get a lot of features for those extra shekels. Not only that, but the Scorpion products cost a bunch less than other third party solutions.....

....Scorpion is currently working on a drop-in replacement motor for the Trex 600E and based on my experience with this upgrade, I can say that I will definitely be replacing my stock 600XL motor with a Scorpion. I'm hoping that they will also be introducing a matching heli-version ESC with it as I believe Scorpion's governor features would be even more beneficial to a heli of that size.

Originally published at HeliGeek blog

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