About a year and a half ago, in an attempt to keep playing with new technology, I bought myself a DJI Mini 3 Pro drone. The tech was way ahead of the last drone I owned (the Parrot AR).

I was flying it for a month before disaster struck after I attempted to fly it too close to a tree. In the resulting crash, one of the rotor arms broke.

Fueled by the dangerous cocktail of overconfidence and the wildly misleading ‘can-do’ attitude from a YouTube DIY video (which featured a different model of drone), I bought a replacement rotor arm and started to disassemble my drone. Expectations crashed harder than my drone when I popped open its chest to discover a mechanical labyrinth that looked nothing like the ‘easy-to-fix’ innards displayed on the video.

I disassembled the drone and replaced the rotor arm, but it has taken me another year to get around to reassembling it.

It was thanks to the following video from “How-Fixit” that helped me to get the drone rebuilt:

I was finally able to test my repair yesterday. Wonder of wonders - it works! My drone was able to take to the sky again!