so anyway this has been bugging me for a few days now. went into a tree pretty hard on saturday, nothing looked obviously broken, arms are fine, props were toast obviously replaced those. but one motor just feels... off. its not making a grinding noise or anything, spins up fine when i do the motor test in betaflight, but in the air the quad feels unbalanced and the one corner seems like its fighting harder or not keeping up

ran the motors up on a bench without props and they all seem to spin freely, no noticeable wobble. but something is wrong. could this be a betaflight thing or do i just need to accept the motor took a hit. its a 2306 on a 4 inch which i know is a weird combo but thats what came on the frame

check the motor screws first, sounds dumb but a loose motor will do exactly what you're describing. also pull the motor off and look at the bell from underneath, sometimes you get a dent in the bell that you cant see from the top and it causes just enough imbalance to mess with things. had this happen twice and both times i convinced myself it was software before finally admitting the motor was just done.

if you have a spare motor swap it and see, that'll tell you everything. also worth checking your ESC logs if your ESC supports it, some of the newer ones will actually show desync events or weird current spikes on that particular motor which confirms its a hardware issue

betaflight blackbox is your friend here, go fly a pack and then look at the motor output traces for all four motors. if one is consistently pegged higher than the others trying to compensate thats your answer right there. could still be a bent shaft even if it spins freely by hand, a bent shaft will cause vibration that shows up in the gyro data and just makes everything fight itself. shafts on smaller motors are suprisingly easy to bend in a real impact