Hi all. Following a sudden death drop, I have had to replace the Phantom 2 shell. Every thing went smoothly until the end, when I tried to put in the last screws to close the shell. I noticed that as soon as the screws resisted tightening, that the allen key lost grip and started to turn in the screw head.

I immediately tried to get it out, and had some difficulty doing so. If I had gone ahead, I may have ended up with 12 screws that would have been very hard, if not impossible to remove without drilling.

I compared the new screws that were supplied with the replacement shell with the old ones, and noticed that the screw head holes for the allen key weren't quite as deep as my old screws. That millimetre or so stopped the allen key from fully engaging, leading to the slippage when tightening.

I tried both the supplied dji allen key, as well as a higher quality one, same effect.

It seems to me to be a fault in the screw manufacturing process.

Has anyone else come accross this problem?

ps  as an aside, I also noticed that the new shell seemed to be a bit more flimsy than the original. It seemed to be slightly less rigid, and flexed more. Different plastic?

While I can't say what is used to fix the P2 shell, I noticed that in my P3, the screws attaching the motors have an Allen socket head, but all the others used in the case are Tork screws, which do not work well with an Allen key.

Geebax Posted at 2016-3-6 11:37
While I can't say what is used to fix the P2 shell, I noticed that in my P3, the screws attaching th ...

Thanks Geebax, P2 shell has same allen socket on both shell and motor screws.

Is your allen key sharp enough? I had issues like this using cheap allen screwdriver

DJI-Tim Posted at 2016-3-7 16:38
Is your allen key sharp enough? I had issues like this using cheap allen screwdriver

Hi Tim. Yes, definitely. I have used different keys to rule that out. The dji one and a new high quality one. Visually, I can even see that the key does not go in quite as far in the new screws. The dji supplied key has no problem with my older screws, but will not fit into the socket of any of the new screws. I just checked again, and got the new key into 6 screws out of the pack by pushing past  a definite burr in the socket.  The new key is actually a 5/64 inch  (1.98mm) which is just fractionally smaller than the dji key, which I believe is 2mm. The shop I bought the new shell from posted a new pack of screws today.

I did a shell swap on a P2V+ and had no problems. Why not use the old screws if the allens wrench fits them?

Username Here Posted at 2016-3-8 11:41
I did a shell swap on a P2V+ and had no problems. Why not use the old screws if the allens wrench fi ...

I was short of a couple of the original screws, plus I wanted to use screws with fresh threadlocker.

I got the new pack of screws, so problem is solved.

The set of screws that came with the replacement shell were manufactured with faults. Could have caused a headache trying to get them out if the socket had stripped!