Since my bipe went down, I've been working on it some more.

First, I had to repair the structural damage. I opted to change over to the fiberglass DuBro landing gear. It's a little wider (left-to-right) and marginally taller. I put in new plywood attachment point, a little deeper (front-to-back) than the original, to accomodate the gear. And put in some additional reinforcement. As a result of the new gear, the wheels are probably 1/4 to 3/8 inch further forward then they originally were.

Next I decided I put off building my motor test stand long enough. It turned out pretty well. It is essentially a drawer. The motor attaches to the sliding part, a digital scale attaches to the base. Clamp the base to something big and heavy, attach wires, and you're good to go.

I ran three (3) ten-minute motor tests with the bipe's setup. Each test was at about 2/3 power, with 10 second bursts to full throttle every minute. Encouraging, After each test, the batteries needed about 3200 mAh to recharge. An 8 minute flight should be more than possible. Also, after the tests, I took temperature readings. Nothing was over heated. The motor, the hottest, was at about 140 degrees, the ESC and Batts, 105.

The Watt meter says at full throttle I was drawing 1140 watts, and 52 amps, the scale says I was pulling about 8.4 pounds of thrust. At 2/3 throttle, about 400 watts, 20 amps, and 5 pounds of thrust.

I reworked the ESC location for better cooling, my two theories are 1) that the ESC overheated and shutdown, and 2) that I had a flakey battery that died mid-flight.

I added a few pictures of my work.
Picture 1: the motor test stand.
Picture 2: the new ESC mount.
Picture 3: the battery slides within the tank area.
Picture 4: the battery mount (notice servo screw in front corner to hold in place)
Picture 5: the battery hatch.