Guys,
Had an incident the other day where on take-off the ship hit some deep grass and flopped over, I expected the ESC to cut off on high amps but it kept flopping around trying to spin the prop. It was not at full RPM and did cut but I did see some wisp of white smoke from the motor area just before it shut down. I had this happen on another ship a few years back and it did toast the motor. This motor is a BAD ASS 2320/820k on 4S pack. Since there was nothing hot I decided to do a 10 sec test run just for the hell of it. ESC beeped normal and motor spun up as normal. I then did a quick test flight (gave myself more runway to get the ship off before the grass) and all was well. So, question since all seems well could the motor be OK or is it just going to suddenly fail in flight?

Also, in order to get the shutdown to occur faster I have moved the current cutoff from normal to sensitive, did a test run and it spooled up normal can I go to very sensitive, or would that cause a cut with just a minor clip of grass or the ground?

Best,    DennisT

It would be real helpful if you let us know what the ESC is.

Chris,
The ESC is a Castle Talon 35. Set for CL mode, fixed rpm.

Best,   DennisT

Well, actually got to test the sensitive current cut out setting today as I was trying a new field, deeper grass than I would like, the ship tried to go but got bogged down, chopped some grass then flop nosed down and the ESC took it out, no smoke. So, I'm going to stick with that setting for now.

Best,   DennisT

You beat me to the anser.  I accidentally found out that setting the current limiting to sensitive would shutdown the ESC in the case of a prop strike.  For Castle ESCs, if you exceed the current limit, the ESC will shutdown; if flying R/C, you can re-set it by cycling the throttle back to zero but in our case, the timer always sends a throttle signal so it shuts down and it stays that way.