After a little bit of a bumpy road when first joining the efoil.builders forum and a bit of a postage issue with Felix, HGL reached out to me and asked me if I was prepared to review their one motors for them and chat about it here. They are really keen to build some trust with the efoil forum (this would obviously lead to sales for them) and improve their product offerings.
I’ll state upfront that I have no vested interest in this and don’t stand to gain anything as I can access the motor manufacture directly anyway if I want cheap motors. This is going to be a candid review of the whole process…
The motor is the one at the following link: https://www.gd-hgl.com/products/65162-100kv-120kv-motor and can currently be bought with 10% discount if you use discount code OFF10.
I requested a 100Kv motor as I already have the Maytech 120Kv which I have been using with the FR prop for over a year now. This would allow me to do a solid comparison between the 2 units and different KV ratings. I wasn’t sent a prop with the review unit, so I went out and got my own prop. I chose the 8" pitch version as I have previously run an 8" pitch 3D printed prop on the 120Kv and it handled it alright. Here is a link to the prop I chose: 7 1/2x8-BA Aluminum Outboard Propeller For Yamaha Mariner 4-6HP 6E0-45941-01-EL Sale - Banggood USA-arrival notice-arrival notice
After ordering, HGL sent the motor with Fedex and it arrived in 3 days. Here are some pics of the packaging and unboxing:
Package came taped to within an inch of its life and box was undamaged.
Once first box was open, as you can see there is loads of foam padding.
The motor box was also fully wrapped in bubble wrap
As Felix has already pointed out, it appears they have improved the padding inside the main motor box so that the motor can not longer shift and push the shaft through the box.
This packaging is a lot better than the old packaging that was used a year ago and should hopefully avoid any motor damage during shipping.
The motor has the spline shaft and the ceramic seal.
Next I will be opening the motor and adding some corrosion X so that it has extra protection should any water happen to get inside and also cutting the prop down somewhere between 140-150mm.
I have a decent size pool in my back garden so will also do some static tests which should give me a good indication of what speeds I can expect from the combination…
Update 1:
The first test for this motor was to establish the actual KV (what the motor spins at) the motor has. This was done with nothing attached and nothing added to the motor. I found that the motor spun at 95kv. This ties in pretty similarly to the 120Kv motor where i also had a loss of 5kv and had it spinning at 115kv.
I have now modified the prop to 150mm. It now looks as follows:
Next step testing in the pool…
Update 2:
I am using a 12S battery and the ARC200 ESC. No corrosion X in motor yet…
100KV motor:
Unloaded RPM is 4375
In the pool, the motor managed to get the prop speed to 1850 RPM. Plugged into the mercury prop slip calculator this would translate to a speed of 13mph (it would be higher in a non-static environment).
120KV motor:
In the pool, the motor managed to get the FR prop to 2540 RPM. Plugged into the prop slip calculator, this results in a similar speed as above. But it should be noted that the This combo had way more thrust and moved way more water in the pool.
Next up is taking the 8" pitch prop down to 130mm to see if I can get more rpm out of it. I’ll probably take the 8" pitch prop down to 120mm eventually before I introduce the FR prop to the 100Kv motor.
