The longer I fly quads, the more comfortable I get, and the more risks I start to take. As a result I end up crashing a fair bit, not as often as when I first started, but these crashes involve more speed and end up causing a lot more wear and tear on my quad. For example, here’s photos from 3/14 and 3/23 just over a week apart.

The props are so shiny and smooth with clean edges in the one on the left, whereas the one on the right has been crashed a few times and the props have whacked tree branches, pavement, and the gutter along the edge of my garage. The frame has taken some serious frontal hits and started to split a bit on the end of one of the arms. You can also see a scratch on the motor bell too.

I’ve found that I’m taking a fair bit of pride in how used it looks after about a week of flying. It means I’m pushing myself trying to get better. Taking risks. Crashing doesn’t scare me at this stage since I’m getting enough experience with repairs that I don’t think there’s anything I couldn’t replace in it. In fact, thinking about it now, I think there’s probably two motors that are original, plus the canopy, and the camera. Everything else the frame, the flight controller, the video transmitter, and the receiver are all upgraded or replacements.

All that said, I’ve been grounded the last few days because of the weather. We had a couple of days of rain, and I thought I was going to be able to fly on Sunday but I hadn’t realized that we were in for 30 MPH winds. That’s too much for me to handle for yard flying when I might catch a gust at the wrong time and hit my house or worse the neighbor’s. I was almost able to sneak in some time on Thursday last week but it literally started raining as I walked outside to set up, so I had to turn around and go back inside. Rather than just discharge all my batteries and give up through I used them to charge up a set of 1S batteries and flew my whoop inside. It’s not quite the same but it’s still fun.

Fly Hard, Break Stuff
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