Blade research, 8 brands, what's best...

[Kap'n Krunch]

Originally Posted by snjbird

Hello Heli Freaks,

I have been hearing a lot of questions about blades, so I have taken it upon myself to do a little research on them, and to post my findings…. This will be a running review and I look forward to finding out what the “Best Blades’ are!

Now that being said the results will be the best blades for me, I want to try to keep my research objective, so I am going to try different things to test the blades. Right now I have done some weights and measures to get the bottom line on 6 sets of blades. In the future there will be more but for now these six will be the base line for the testing!

I have

Thunder Power 325s
SAB 320s
Align 325Ds
Sonix 325s ( Heli Direct brand and the cheapest)
Radix 325s
Maverikk G5 325s


To start the review I got out my ruler, blade balance, and calipers, plus the old digital scale…






As it turns out different manufactures have different ways to measure the length of their blades.





I set the bolt hole to 325 and then looked at the blade tip at the trailing edge of the blade...





Hmmm. they are not all 325? In fact only 2 come close and they are the Thunder Power and the Maverikk.


So I took two measurements, total blade length, and blade length from the center of the mounting hole.


Total Blade length

Thunder Power 337mm
G5 336mm
SAB 331mm
Align 325mm
Sonix 326mm
Radix 325mm

From the bolt hole...

Thunder Power 326mm
G5 325mm
SAB 319mm
Align 315mm
Sonix 315mm
Radix 314mm

Next I put the blades on the balance and checked for the length ways CG.





Then I took measurements of the distance from the center of the bolt hole to the CG of the blade.

Thunder Power 171mm
G5 164mm
SAB 168mm
Align 166mm
Sonix 169mm
Radix 156mm

Next I put the blades on the scale and looked at the blades weight.




Thunder Power 22g
G5 31.7g
SAB 20.3g
Align 19.8g
Sonix 20.1g
Radix 21.8g

Since I have had loads of blades through the years I know that blade weight can vary from set to set from the same manufacture, 5 Grams +- is pretty normal...

The last thing I looked at was the blade thickness at the leading edge

Thunder Power 4.22mm
G5 5.1mm
SAB 5.2mm
Align 4.05mm
Sonix 4.15mm
Radix 4.06mm

Well looking at the results from the Facts, and these will be the only facts here, since every review is subject t the bias of the reviewer! I can draw a few conclusions

But I wonder what you Heli freaks would gather from these weights and measures?

I come into this review with a favorite, but there are some new blades here for me to try. If you have seen any of my other post on this topic you'll know I like the Thunder Power blades!

honestly if you are using your 450 for crash practice and planning on a lot of it hobbyking pro 3d blades for 8 bucks ill buy 15, 20 sets at a time and go to work

[BoostinSwifty38]

450l dominator pilot here, loving the align 360 cf blades, but was curious if anyone had tried the zeal energy 360 blades? Im looking to pick up some and some for the tail too (deciding on size 68 or 61). Thoughts?