Clugh custom wound motor powers Team USA's Andrew Jesky to the 2025 F3A World Championship.
- Clugh Motors
- Nov 7, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 11, 2025
For the past two years, I have collaborated with Brenner Sharp from Brenner Contra Drives. He hired me to develop a motor head for his counter-rotational coaxial planetary gearbox propulsion unit, designed for 2-meter pattern flight RC airplanes. Brenner is an active member of the Canadian F3A team. The motor head selected by Brenner for me to modify and rewind to achieve a specific torque constant was a Kontronics Pyro 600. This is a compact, handheld 230-gram, 10-pole BLDC motor. Kontronics is a division of Sobek Drives.
The motors I built following Brenner's specifications and according to him are the best he's ever used, reducing his battery consumption by an average of 500-800 milliamp hours in his 25P flight program. This successful collaboration allowed me to have Andrew Jesky from Team USA F3A fly a specially tuned Kontronics 650 in his VLV helical gear/belt driven VLV contra drive. The motor, I called the AJ, features a 16-turn dual-layer parallel winding with in 17 AWG conductor, encapsulated in a thermally conductive boron nitride compound. It also includes a bearing upgrade from the standard cheap hobby-grade NMB bearings to three ABEC 7 no-contact orange seal ceramic hybrids treated with Tungsten Disulfide. These bearings use a special Tungsten Disulfide high-speed bearing grease. With this setup, Andrew won the 2025 world championship, marking his 8th appearance as a finalist. He noted that the motors provided a 10% increase in efficiency, allowing him to perform additional maneuvers to earn more points in the highly competitive RC plane pilot sport. In his primary plane, he has never replaced the motor since the initial test.
This was Andrews 8th time competing as a finalist in the world championships. His previous accomplishments are as follows:
7-time USA F3A National Champion
8-time USA F3A World Team Member (2007-2023)
7-time USA F3A World Team captain
7-time Finalist and Top 8 finisher at the World Championships
Andrew also designs his own biplanes. Which run VLV contra drives and Jeti Mezon inverters.
Another P600 is complete for a Brenner contra drive V4.
Another one done for another Top Pilot!
For fun, I decided to log an 8 x 10 APC sport propeller in direct drive on a custom-wound 9-turn parallel wye, 14-pole Kontronics Pyro P600 running on a 10S LiPo. It’s similar to the 600 I wind for the Brenner Contra drive but with a much lower Kv. Using the Castle Hydra ICE 200 HV v2, the test spun the 8 x 10 up to 23,700 RPM, drawing 4.7 kW at 136 amps.
What an OEM winding looks like. These in particular are burned out. Many of the Pyro 600s and motors in the 3225 class used for F3A Coaxial Contra drives come in this way. It is typical. It is also very easy to see the time taken to put much more copper in the slot ! All the Pyro motors come in as Delta machines. For this application I chose to replace the OEM terminations to a parallel wye machines to run at 10s lipo.
rgreen24's custom would pyro 600 for his Brenner Contra drive V4. Is a 10 turn parallel delta. The motors are wound in 240C 18 AWG wire from Remington Industries.
Vicente's Gaishen 10 pole for his Brenner Contra drive V4.