so anyway this has been bugging me for a few days. picked up a cheaper chinese frame, wont name it but its one of the budget ones you see everywhere. flew it maybe 8 times, nothing crazy, mostly just cruising around a field with maybe 2 or 3 actual crashes that werent even that hard. looked at it yesterday and theres a clean crack right through one of the arms, not at the motor mount end, kind of in the middle which seems weird to me.

the thing is the crashes werent bad at all. like grass landings mostly, one time i clipped a tree branch at maybe half throttle. im running a fairly normal 5inch setup, nothing overweight. previous frame was a used Armattan Rooster i got second hand and that thing took way more abuse without cracking. is this just what you get with budget carbon or did i maybe get a defective piece. wondering if the layup on cheaper frames is just garbage or if theres something about how i mounted the motors that could cause this kind of stress fracture

crack in the middle of the arm rather than at the motor mount is usually a layup problem yeah. good carbon should fail at the stress points not randomly in the middle. Armattan uses T700 or similar and their layup process is actually quality controlled, thats why that thing survived. budget frames sometimes use inconsistent fiber orientation or thinner weave in spots that look fine until they dont.

motor mounting can contribute if the screws are overtorqued and creating a stress riser but honestly if its mid-arm that sounds more like material quality to me. some of the budget stuff is genuinely fine, some of it really isnt and its hard to tell until exactly this situation. id contact wherever you bought it but dont expect much

had basically the same thing with a no-name frame i grabbed off aliexpress. cracked on like the 5th flight, wasnt even a hard crash. ended up just spending the extra money on a TBS or Armattan frame and never looked back. sometimes the cheap option costs more in the long run when you factor in reprinting motor mounts and all that. though i know not everyone wants to hear that