so i binned my 5inch pretty hard last weekend, caught a tree branch on a gap attempt and just went full send into the dirt. three motors are spinning fine but motor 3 is just making this horrible grinding noise when i spool it up, and if i arm it and give any throttle at all the quad just flips immediately which yeah, makes sense.

pulled the motor off and the bell is visibly bent, like not catastrophically but definitely not round anymore. the stator looks ok to me but im not an expert. its a t-motor f40 pro iv, not the cheapest motor in the world but not exotic either. local shop wants like 35 bucks to replace it plus labor which honestly feels steep when i could just order another motor for like 45 shipped and do it myself.

question is ? is there any world where a bent bell is salvageable? i've seen people on here talk about pressing them back but i feel like that's just asking for vibration issues and a recrash. also is there anything else i should be checking after a hit that hard, frame looks ok visually but i haven't done a full inspection yet.

bent bell is almost never worth trying to fix honestly. ive tried the pressing method twice and both times i ended up with vibrations bad enough that the flight controller was going nuts trying to compensate. just buy the new motor, your props and your sanity will thank you. the price difference between diy and paying a shop to do it is pretty much always worth learning to do it yourself too, it's not hard at all once you've done one.

for the inspection ? definitely check your frame arms for stress cracks especially around the motor mount holes, those can look totally fine and then snap on the next hard landing. also pop the stack and look for any cracked solder joints on your ESC, a hard enough hit can crack them even if everything looks ok from the outside. run the motors one at a time through betaflight before you fly it again and watch the rpm graphs for anything weird.

yeah dont bother with the bent bell, i tried that once with a cheaper motor and it just vibrated itself loose mid flight which was a whole other problem. also check your frame ? i had a crack i missed after a similar crash and it let go about 30 seconds into my next flight which was not fun at all