Ken
I have been working towards finding the right motor combination for a heavy lift machine. My latest Flying Camera Mount design uses only four MK 3538's turning 14x4.7's cut down to 13" thus far I am not convinced that I need a hexa. at this payload. The model fly's far better when the motors are working quite hard. I get 10 mins from one 4100 lipo.
Denny
I've been kicking around the idea of swapping the stock Roxxy 2827-35's out for a set of the MK3538, I'm just having a hard time justifying buying 6 of them at $90 something each! Then there's the potential reduction in flight time afterward although with more lift capability I can carry more battery and get that back to some degree. Its the whole cycle of spend/upgrade that gets me wondering if the benefits are worth it or can I live with what I've got, I don't plan to carry anything heavier than what I've already flown with and I can't fit any big DSLR's on the mount so I really don't have a need for a true heavy lifter.
The Hoverfly quad on the other hand has 4 RCtimer BC 2826-15 930KV motors on it and so far it kicks A** on 3S packs. I started running Turnigy 3S 2650mAh packs wired in parallel for even weight distribution and extended flight time and it easily gets 10 minutes not even coming close to low battery. Due to the cold I haven't tried to find out just how long it will fly in the current configuration, my fingers are getting pretty numb by 10 minutes, but I'd say easily 15 minutes. I also have a pair of 3S 5000 mAh packs and yesterday I strapped both of them on to see how it handled it and it flew fine, hover at barely over 1/2 throttle so it's not being strained by the extra weight and after 10 minutes in the air the packs read 57% charged when I connected them to the Hyperion Duo, looks like I'll get close to 20 minutes on that setup in warm weather.
The Droidworx has the good camera mount and I just swapped the lens on the GoPro, I'm really pleased with the result, so that's going to be my video platform and camera setup until something better and not uber expensive comes along though I think that's going to be way down the road. The Hoverfly has the old stock MK Hexa frame refit to quad configuration and carrying the old HiSight II mount. Due to Hoverfly still working out bugs in the firmware its not as stable a platform as the MK and the HiSight is not even close to being a sturdy, vibration free mount, so while it's OK for video with the GoPro, it's much better for the Canon SX 200 doing stills via CHDK. I did find a bit of a deal on the basic GoPro Hero HD so I grabbed another one for a spare/stock unit, now I have the older Hero with lens mod and the new one with stock wide angle so I can mount the spare on the Hoverfly if needed.
I think I've got the bases covered for the moment for both video and stills, now I'll just be fine tuning the two until I have a pressing need to upgrade which hopefully won't be for quite a while, the toy budget needs some time to recover.
Then again if I happen to find some extra $ lying around, I really would like to have one of Cedric's frames
Ken