Hi MechEng,

I think there are a few mods that could be done to make them better. I was hoping to see what people would do with them. The bands themselves can also be printed with less density. I printed mine at only 20 percent, which gave a little more flex. To be honest, I'm really not sure weight is a problem for the Inspire.  You could also substitute the carbon rods with carbon tubes which would probably give the greatest weight saving. Though you potentially weaken the guards to lateral forces.

Brilliant !!! no more to say

interesting, Prop guards work pretty good on the phantoms due to the body being able to take a crash quite well and its narrow landing gear design being quite prone to tipping over easily however im of the opinion that prop guards are quite useless on the inspire.  Any sort of crash(personal experience) will shatter at least one of the paper thin carbon fiber arms like glass($400 each side) and break the camera gimble in half($550), break the antenna wire in the foot($175) and the $10 prop will be the least of your worries.  I really dont see any scenario where a prop guard would be at all beneficial unless you like bumping it up against objects very slowly or something.  I saw a cool video of a guy bouncing and scraping his inspire with no camera off the ground lightly with the stock prop guards, kinda neat but not very practical,  lol!  The weak arms just cant take much of a hit without breaking and ive heard of people breaking them just from landing hard.  I was quite shocked when mine broke and i saw how thin they really are.  I wish they were about 5x as thick, then it would be much more sturdy.  I was gonna try to replace mine with thicker carbon fiber tubes but it proved to be much more work than i wanted to attempt as the mounting plates are glued into the original tubes and would be very hard and time consuming to remove.  Also the quote i got back for the custom made thicker carbon fiber tubes was around $3K with a minimum order of 50 feet and you only need about 5 feet to replace them all so i quickly abandoned that idea.

Maybe someone with a 3d printer could print new ends to glue onto the tubes or something, but thats a bit out of my realm of expertise.  Possibly theres a stock size thicker carbon fiber tube available much cheaper that could be utilized if you could somehow make your own ends which the feet and motors screw onto.  If this was possible id check into it again.  Stock carbon tubes are about $1.50 a foot but to retool to make a custom size is very very expensive, might pan out to be affordable if we could get a bunch of interested people and make hundreds of feet of them as they get significantly cheaper for higher quantities.  Best option right now is just dont crash or youre likely looking at a cool $1000 in repair costs if youre lucky, heh.