hi there everyone today we're going to be looking at a couple of motors from newbie drone the smooth V2 2306.5 and the flow V2 2306.5 of course we're going to be looking at these motors on the bench and we're going to be doing a whole heap of tests on the thrust stand to see how they perform against all of the other five inch Motors that I've tested but more than that we're going to be looking in detail at a unique feature of the Newbie drone smooth V2 it's single piece magnet design it's a lot to cover in one video so let's not waste any more time let's dive right into it let's start by taking a quick look at the flow V2 on the bench so the first thing to see is that this is a unibell motor the aluminum Bell extends all the way down over the flux ring and it's got this neat 10 spoke design on the top this does create a little bit of a sharp edge here which I'm always a little bit worried about sharp edges on motor Bells because I think they're more liable to get dented in a crash but apart from that the motor seems well made and looks like it would be pretty durable apart from that sharp edge on the top of the Bell there if we turn the motor over you can see that the Bellows attached to the stator by this M3 screw here so let's go ahead and take the motor apart and have a look at the bell and stator separately with the motor apart we can have a look inside the Bell and the shaft screw is locked tighted into the shaft so you do need to apply a little bit of force to undo that screw and you might need to warm the motor up a little bit with a heat gun or something like that just to loosen that Loctite if it's a little bit tight when you try and take your motor apart the magnets are glued into the top part of the bell and there is a clear use of quite a lot of adhesive so I imagine these magnets are not going to be going anywhere they're going to be very secure one thing I did notice is there's no little o-ring on the top of the of the motor bearing there normally you'd see a little rubber o-ring and a little washer and that helps protect the top bearing in a crash but this motor doesn't have that so that might make the the top bearing on this motor a little bit more vulnerable to Sharp impacts sort of down on top of the motor because there's no cushioning for that top bearing I'd like to see maybe in the next version of this motor a little o-ring in there and a little washer to cushion any any impact and help prolong the life of that bearing but apart from that the motor belt is nicely made and there's evidence of balancing mud in the in the motor belt so this motor has been dynamically balanced as well if we take a look now at the stator this is a very traditional stated design we've got two nine by four millimeter bearings pushed inside the aluminum base and then the stator is pushed over the top of that and there is a little slot there so we may also find there's a bit of adhesive to kind of hold all this together nice single strand windings and they are really nice and neat which is good to see so single strand windings always preferred for high power High Performance Motors because they're just better for cooling if you want to take a look at the results from these newbie drone Motors and over 50 other five inch Motors that I've tested head on over to AOS Labs there's a link down in the video description and you'll find all of that data as well as recommendations for the best fpv Motors that you can buy today let's look at the smooth V2 now and the smooth V2 has a lot of similarities to the flow V2 we just looked at the Bell design is identical it's got that 10 spoke design and the unibel construction the first difference I noticed is that the shaft screw on the smooth V2 is an M2 countersunk screw rather than the M3 screw on the flow and usually I prefer M3 shaft screws just because they're less likely to strip out but let's take this M2 screw out and see how we get on and then I can show you the differences in the internal construction of this motor compared to the flow alright so now this motor is apart I can tell you that that M2 shaft screw didn't have any Loctite on it I would have liked to have seen a little bit of low strength Loctite or maybe some damping grease on that screw just to stop it backing out but now that we've got the Bell apart we can see the key difference between this motor and the flow V2 is this single piece ring magnet all the way around the outside edge of the motor there's no o-ring or little washer on this motor to cushion the top bearing either so again in in a future version I'd like to see that just to improve durability a bit but this this ring magnet here is unique as far as I know among fpv Motors so we're going to be looking in detail at how they make this ring magnet and how its performance compares to the individual magnets on the flow V2 in terms of the stator design of the smooth V2 as far as I can tell it's identical to the flow V2 and we are going to be making use of that later in the video to understand what makes the single piece ring magnet in the smooth V2 so special first we need to understand how the super strong neodymium magnets that we use in our fpv Motors are normally made so firstly we take a whole bunch of different elements neodymium iron Boron and small amounts of other alloying elements and we melt them together in an induction furnace under vacuum so we use an alternating magnetic field to inductively heat all these materials up until they melt and flow together and we do that under vacuum so there's no air no oxygen that can react with those materials when they're really really hot once we've got that molten neodymium magnet mix we pour it over a chilled roller to rapidly cool it down make it form back into a solid and produce these little flakes of neodymium magnet material it's really important that we cool the mix really really fast because we don't want to give any time for all of the elements that we muddled up mixed together to be able to separate out during the cooling process they all need to stay mixed up to form the material that has that super strong magnetic property then we take those neodymium magnet Flakes and we treat them with hydrogen gas and that hydrogen gas chemically reacts with the grain boundaries within those Flakes and makes them super brittle super crumbly then we blast those flakes together with supersonic Jets of nitrogen gas in a jet milling machine to turn those flakes into a super fine neodymium magnet powder then we take our neodymium magnet powder and we compact it in a hydraulic press under the influence of the magnetic field and that magnetic field aligns all the little granules of powder in the same direction and that's going to be the preferred magnetization direction for our magnet at the end once we have that compacted block of powder we put it in a vacuum furnace at 1100 degrees centigrade and that temperature is high enough to allow all the little granules of powder to kind of bond together on the surface but without changing the magnetic structure of the material overall so we still have that preferred magnetization Direction and The microstructure that we created when we initially made those magnet flakes once the magnets have been sintered they can be machined to whatever shape is needed and then plated first with nickel then copper then nickel again to form a really thick plating all over the neodymium magnet and the reason that we plate the magnet like this is to protect it from the air any Oxygen would react with the neodymium material and that would degrade the magnetic performance of the magnet over time so we coat them with nickel copper nickel to make sure that doesn't happen and that shiny coating that you see when you look at a neodymium magnet is that outer nickel plating the final step after the magnet has been made is to magnetize it and that's done by placing the finished magnet inside a larger electromagnet and applying a massive Pulsar magnetism generated by thousands of amps of current to set that magnet in its preferred magnetization Direction and align all of the magnetic domains within the material so the magnet reaches its full strength so that's how the strongest permanent magnets in the world are made but we can't use that process to make the ring magnet in the smooth V2 because we need that ring magnet to be able to be magnetized in a whole bunch of different directions moving around the ring and we can't achieve that with a sintering process because as we now know you have a preferred direction for that sintered magnet so the way that the magnet in the smooth V2 is made is we take that neodymium powder that fine powder and we combine it with a polymer binder an epoxy we mold that into a ring shape and then cure it in an oven at a low temperature and then we have a mixture of plastic and neodymium magnet material it's about three to five percent plastic and 95 to 97 neodymium magnet and that bonded magnet can be magnetized equally in all directions so we take that ring magnet and we put it into a special fixture that magnetizes it in different directions all the way around to produce the 14 pole magnetization structure that we need for our Motors there are some drawbacks with using a bonded magnet like this because it doesn't have a preferred magnetization Direction the maximum field strength that we can magnetize it to is lower than for a typical sintered magnet and we also lose a little bit of magnetic power because we're not we've not got a hundred percent neodymium magnet material we've only got about 95 to 97 of the material is neodymium magnet so that also reduces the maximum possible field strength but we do end up with a magnet that is very durable because the polymer material is slightly flexible it's tough It's durable and it's easier to assemble because we just have a single ring to push into the motor rather than having to individually assemble 14 different magnets this is a Gauss meter and it allows us to measure the magnetic field strength of the magnets in our Motors so let's take a look at the bonded neodymium magnet in the smooth V2 as I move the probe around the edge you can see the field strength goes up and down but I'm looking for the peak field strength and you can see that we can get about 400 and about 430 Miller Teslas if I get the probe in exactly the right place so that's the the peak field strength that can be generated by that bonded neodymium magnet there now let's take a look at the sintered neodymium magnets in the flow V2 again with the probe and I'll move it around try and find the peak you can see that the peak field strength here for the flow V2 is closer to 470 Miller Teslas so you can see that there's about a 10 increase in the magnetic field strength with the sinter neodymium magnet compared to the bonded neodymium magnet so as you can see from that quick test the bonded neodymium magnet in the smooth V2 is only able to generate about 90 percent of the field strength of the sintered magnet in the flow V2 but how is this going to affect the Motor Performance well to look at that we're going to be testing the smooth V2 and the flow V2 and because they have different KVs I'm also going to be taking the bell of the smooth V2 and putting it on the stator of the flow V2 so we can get a direct Apples to Apples comparison of the bonded neodymium magnet versus the center neodymium magnet so let's not waste any more time let's get into the test results we'll start by looking at the measured KV of the motor for this test I run the motor without a prop at 10 volts and measure the RPM divide that RPM by 10 and that gives you the KV of the motor in RPM per volt and what we can see is that the motors all test out a little bit lower than spect so the 1850 KV flow V2 tests out closer to 1800 KV and the smooth V2 1750 KV tests out quite a bit lower closer to 1650 KV so they're testing out a little bit lower than stated it's interesting to see the that swapping the Bell from the flow V2 Bell to the smooth V2 Bell increases the KV significantly and that's actually to be expected because if you reduce the field strength of the magnets in the rotor that will increase the KV all else being equal because you'll get less back EMF for the same RPM because the magnets are not quite as strong and they're not able to induce such a strong current let's look at the thrust versus electrical power plot for these motors now and this is collected using a throttle ramp from zero to 100 throttle on a standard test prop in HQ 5 by 4.5 by 3. there are two things that I want to call out on this graph that I see the first is that the smooth V2 produces a lot less thrust at Full Throttle than the flow V2 and that's to be expected because it has a much lower KV what's interesting is that when we swap the flow V2 motor to the smooth V2 Bell so we put the smooth V2 Bell on the flow V2 stator the smooth V2 Bell the bonded neodymium magnet has less efficiency than the center neodymium Magnus which is as to be expected because it's got low magnetic field strength but it actually produces more maximum thrust and that's because the increase in KV more than offsets the loss in efficiency in this case so that we actually get more top end if we put the smooth V2 Bell on the flow V2 stator this is the same chart but this time I've added some more motors for comparison so we can see that I've added the t-moto veloce V2 1750 and 1950 KV and the Emax eco2 and RCM power wasp major 1860 KV and what we can see is that in general the the Newbie Joe Motors are you know falling behind some of these other Motors in certain respects so they are a bit less efficient than most of the 1750 KV Motors and in fact a little bit less efficient even than the veloce V2 1950 KV and they don't have the the top end power of let's say the the WASP major 1860 KV or certainly the veloche V2 1950 KV so that indicates that these motors perhaps are not quite as magnetically optimized as they could be and that obviously that the lower strength of the bonded magnet is also hurting the smooth V2 compared to the sintered magnets that these other Motors are using the next chart I want to show you is a torque versus RPM curve for these motors and this data is collected by accelerating a flywheel of a known inertia 100 kilogram millimeters squared up to 20 000 RPM as fast as possible and by measuring the torque that the motor is exerting during that test we can get the maximum torque that it's able to generate across that RPM range from about 5000 to 20 000 RPM and again here we see a big difference in performance between the centered magnets of the flow V2 and the bonded magnet of the smooth V2 Bell put onto the flow V2 stator we can see that the flow V2 with the Sinton magnets is able to generate 0.225 newton meters of torque Peak or so whereas the bonded magnet on the flow V2 stator is only able to generate about 0.2 newton meters of torque so that's you know about 10 reduction or so we can also see the effect of a difference in KV here with the lower KV motor producing less torque over the whole RPM range if I now add in some more motors for comparison we can see that the the bonded magnet certainly Falls a little bit behind the center magnets that all the other Motors are using and in general the Newbie joint Motors um aren't performing quite as well as some of the the best performing Motors in this test so if you look at something like the the WASP major which performs really well in this talk test it's able to generate you know about 0.275 newton meters of torque at Peak and that's quite a bit more than the the 0.225 or so that the flow motor is able to generate so I think there's still room here for a new version of this motor with improved magnetic performance to try and get those numbers up closer towards the top of the leaderboard these torque results often translate over into motor responsiveness and I measure responsiveness by measuring how fast the motor can accelerate my test prop I do multiple accelerations and then take the average result and we can see that the smooth V2 is the least responsive motor from this comparison with The Wasp major being the most responsive and the difference between the bonded and the center magnets on the flow V2 stator is is noticeable so you can see that the scented magnets do have better motor responsiveness as a result of being able to produce more torque now that I've given you my conclusions on the motor I want to take a moment to kind of push back on some of this this marketing of smoothness a lot of Manufacturers Market smooth Motors as being motors with lower torque so they use weaker magnets or like the bonded magnet in the new bedroom motor and then they Market that lower torque motor as smooth um I don't think that the strength of the magnet really has anything to do with smoothness smoothness for me is to do with the balance of the motor if the motor has been dynamically balanced and therefore doesn't vibrate when it spins then that to me is a smooth motor overall I don't see why we would want to to push for lower torque Motors as being more smooth we as Pilots don't directly control the throttle settings of our Motors on the quad that's controlled by the flight controller and the flight controller wants Motors that are responsive and can change the RPM of the prop and therefore the thrust produced very very rapidly to respond to the the flight controller's requests which are being updated you know thousands of times every second so every little bit of extra responsiveness you can get out of the motor the flight controller can definitely make use of so I would say let's steer clear from calling low torque Motors smooth and let's just focus on trying to produce Motors that are as torquey and responsive as possible because overall that's really what our flight controllers need to perform really well and that's what's going to give us a smoother flight experience if you really enjoyed this video enjoyed my little rant at the end and you like the work that I'm doing on this channel then please consider supporting me to make more videos like this um the best way you can do that is to join my patreon you can join from just a few dollars a month there's a link down in the video description and not only will you get access to a special area of my Discord server you'll also get to see projects that I'm working on and also have the opportunity to feed into new designs for fpv products that I'm working on and help make them even better so if that's something that you'd like to do I'd love to see there check out the link in the video description and join up on my patreon that's all I have for you for today so until next time I wish you a very very happy flying