Longer flight times on you leader 120 - Gemfan 3025 dual blade props

The Leader 120 is a very well thought out and put together micro quadcopter that I have reviewed on the bench here and after initial flights here. Flight time is good, especially compared to the quads with the smaller 2" blades. The standard King Kong 2840 3 blade props are strong and well balanced but also fairly agressive that can cause weaker batteries to sag on punch outs.

Since this quad has a lot of blade area for a light weight, I tried the twin blade Gemfan 3025 propellers that have one less blade and a more gentle pitch. Unfortunately the just fould on the frame so had to be trimmed by about 1-2mm to fit. For this job I 3d printed the flexRC jig from thingiverse which can also be bought directly from flexRC. To this you mount a standard nail clipper and can gaurantee the props will be even and balance.

So how do they fly? Excellent. They are slightly louder since they are now essentially bull-nosed but they were well balanced with similar performance to the 2840s although slightly less floaty. Nominal diameter is about 74mm compared to 70mm on the 2840s. But wow the efficiency! On a turnigy 2s 25c 950mah I got over 10 minutes of flight. On a 460mah 3s that is not is good shape I got 4.5minutes of hard flying. Battery sag was MUCH less and the roll dip that occured on a 3s punch out due to the ESC not keeping up was gone! I have a large pack of the 2840s to use up but am thinking of shelving them for the 3025 props. They seem less durable but have still not broken one after about 6 packs - some minor chips only that doesn't seem to have affected performance.

I'm amazed that more performance can be wrung out of this very good micro quad so I'll keep fixing it until it is broken!

The gemfan 3025 props can be purchased here
The KK 2840 stock props (still good) can be purchased here
The Leader 120 can be purchased here (use code HarvestRCnew7 to get this for $US93.99 until end September 2017)

Please comment here if you want to see flight times with the stock battery which has been given a new life!

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