Quadcopter Shootout – Durability

If you are anything like us, and we know you are, how a well a product holds up to a good thrashing is of the utmost importance, thus the reason for our durability category. Here are how the three combatants stacked up-

In third was the Traxxas. We broke a couple blades on the Traxxas with just normal bashing, and a couple more when doing demo-derby (while neither of the other two quads had any issues up to that point). The broken blades put the Traxxas in third spot, and we sat it for the rest of the torture testing while we put the Heli-Max against the Ares to determine first and second place. After all our durability testing was over, we closely inspected all the quads and discovered that the Traxxas had fractures in all four of its arms and in its center structure, even though it wasn’t put through the final stages of durability testing. To boil it down, we found the Traxxas to not be in the same league as the other two quads durability wise.

Second place went to the Heli-Max. The Heli-Max was extremely tough. I say this because it came away with no issues after playing demo-derby and generally just flying it into walls like we were blind. We then flew it to the ceiling and killed the throttle (multiple times) letting it drop to floor (a height of about 15 feet) and it was unharmed. Then we flew it full speed into a wall (multiple times) with no issues. We simply could not break it by “normal” means. We had to resort to extreme/artificial means to finally bring it down.

What did we have to do? Because we couldn’t break the Heli-Max or the Ares by just flying them, we resorted to kicking them with our feet while they hovered. That didn’t ground either of them. Then we dropped (and threw) a Vaterra Kemora 14th scale rally car on them while they hovered, that didn’t kill them either. But… at that point the Heli-Max was suffering from one bent motor pod and one broken motor pod, while the Ares was still good to go. That is why the Heli-Max came in second.

The win went to the Ares, it was still good to go after all the torture testing mentioned above. It was the King of the Durability hill, and we were all blown away by the extreme amount of torture it withstood without any type of damage. To finally break the Ares we were forced to play baseball with it, meaning we hovered it while Cubby swung a large board slamming it into a concrete wall. Only then did it finally break. The Ares is simply unbelievably tough. If you are holding off buying one of these little quads because they look fragile, I highly recommend you buy an Ares, it will completely blow your mind.

Next up is Ease of Flying or head back to the beginning shootout page.