so this is embarrassing. was re-soldering a motor wire because i had an intermittent M3 dropout that was causing flips on throttle up, had the iron too hot and held it too long trying to get the old solder to flow and now theres basically a little black crater where the pad used to be. the trace underneath looks like its still there but the actual pad is just gone.

its an older Mamba F405 mk2, been flying it for probably 18 months so not the end of the world if i have to replace it but id rather not if i can avoid it. has anyone done a pad repair on something like this, like scraped the trace and used a bodge wire situation? or is it not worth the hassle at this point.

yeah you can absolutely bodge it. scrape the solder mask back carefully with an xacto knife just enough to expose the trace, like a couple mm, then tin that exposed bit and solder a short piece of thin wire to it. motor pads on F4 boards usually trace back to the ESC signal header pins on the back of the FC so you could also just run a wire directly to that pin instead if scraping the trace seems sketchy. ive done this twice and both times flew totally fine afterward. just use low heat and work fast once you're on the actual trace.

tbh at 18 months id probably just use this as an excuse to upgrade to an F7 stack, the mamba F405 is fine but you're always one bad session away from needing to replace something anyway. that said if you want to fix it the trace scrape method does work, seen people do it. just be really careful you dont lift the trace further when you're scraping or you'll be chasing the repair further and further across the board