540 Brushed Motor

[madeuce36]

Hi all,

I understand that most of you want to upgrade your planes to brushless, however, I am cheap. I want to use this as a learning experience without sinking a lot of money into the plane. In any case, I read the series of articles on on amp aviators which demonsrate several upgrades to the cub. The review of the cub mentions an upgrade to a 540 brushed motor and a GWS prop very briefly but does not demonstrate how to do this. Have any of you done this? Is it difficult to do? I linked to these articles using this site which is why I thought someone here might be able to point me in the right direction on how to go about this.

[flydiver]

Nothing in RC is really free and seldom is cheap. That motor may be inexpensive. But the ONLY way to get more power is to consume more power or increase efficiency. Brushless motors do a bit of both. A GOOD brushless motor will get a small boost using stock batteries due an efficiency increase. It will not make the Cub a rocket. The battery becomes the limiting factor. A low end brushless motor (TowerPro) is barely more efficient than the stock motor. BUT (important) it WILL handle more amps and it WILL deliver more power IF you feed it more juice.

Same thing will happen with a 540 brushed. You will NOT increase efficiency, all you do is put in a bigger motor. The motor will require more electrons to work properly. You'll have to upgrade batteries to feed it. Just putting on a bigger prop will do diddly without a power supply increase. Your batteries will be the limiting factor.

The reason everyone goes brushless AND lipo is the amp limits of brushed and the supply limits of small NiMh. Brushless can take a LOT more amps and lipo can deliver it, both with a weight reduction (potentially) which further improves performance.

Long way of saying, not worth the pursuit unless it turns you on.

[duck9191]

also the 540 is gonna be heavier then the stock 480, so more then likely any gains will be lost due to the weight.

for about $35-45 on hobbycity.com you can upgrade to a brushless set up. but either way will require you to change over to a standard radio system, which if you plan to say with r/c you will do sooner or later anyways. watch the buy/sell area at rcgroups.com and rcuniverse.com, you can find great deals on radio systems as alot of people are jumping to 2.4ghz and dumping off thier 72mghz stuff off cheap. my brusless cub was a blast, i could slowly crawl around and take video or prop up and seed around at about 55mph.

[madeuce36]

Duck,

Are you saying to grab up one these 72 mghz systems? What sort of limitations would that present? Sorry if this sounds "stupid" but this is all still very new to me. Most people on here seem to really, really recommend springing for the dx6i. I don't know. I guess I am still in that confused stage where it's difficult to formulate some sort of cohesive plan to move forward. Everyone has an opinion on which way to go. Wrecking my cub and repairing it doesn't scare me anymore. I feel like I want to move forward just not sure how.

[flydiver]

You are in an arena that is somewhat totally subjective. When I'm there I hunker down, and do more research. You have 2 basic options, 72mHz or 2.4. In this forum the 2.4 people are all happy as can be. They also mostly moved from an extremely limited 27mHz TX to a real one. The 'best buy' DX6i is the bottom end of acceptable and more than most people need. The DX7 is considerably better. A lot of the 6ch 72mHz systems are better and if you don't fly with groups so have channel issues are absolutely fine. Somehow people have been managing to fly planes with them for a couple of decades.

BUT (here you are Ellis)-------Spectrum cures everything.