Sunday 25 May 2008

Spun it up.


Well, the helicopter is just about ready to fly. I got all of the electronics in it yesterday afternoon. The first time I spun it it up the servos were twitching like crazy. I guess that is what I get for mounting the BEC up against the ESC. I should have known better. Spetrum 2.4 GHz does not fix everything. :-) I have moved the BEC and put all the ferrite rings back on and it seems ok now.

The other problem I had was that all the links in the kit need to be opened up with a link sizer (comes with the kit) before fitting. I sized them when putting the kit together, but not enough. The flybar was too stiff and the tail linkages were too much for teh tail servo. I reamed out th links again after seeing the flybar not respond correctly and having the BEC give-up because of of the stalled tail servo. See, the receiver was shutting down. at first I thought it was the motor or ESC, but I thought I would watch teh receiver. Sure enough it was shutting down. Not static, but what? I figured out that it was the tail servo when I picked up the helicopter and turned it the servo tried to do it's thing and 'bam' it shut down again. I think the stalled tail servo was pulling more than 4amps! Anyway, after sizing everything again it all seems good.

Some Tech Junk:

Flybar:When the helicopter is powered down you should be able to push/flick the flybar down and it should bounce back up. If it does not the links are too tight and it will not respond well in flight. Tight links can cause all sorts of issues. I had that issue on one of my first spool-ups and have already scratched my tail blades. :-(

Sticky tail: Some one else mentioned that the tail seemed to act very funny in flight like the servo they had was not enough. Well, my tail was not acting right either. Like I said above, the tail linkages were all too tight and basically was stalling the servo. I just had not reamed them enough. So, pull the front link off the tail servo and slide the linkage by hand. You will know if you need to ream the links more. Don't forget the ones on the tail grips.

Pitch
When setting up zero pitch I thought I would have a look at how much pitch we are getting in the head. Now, I am running 15mm arms and had the default 60% swash mixing.

Collective Pitch available: maxed out my pitch gauge. Must be about 15 degrees. Set mine to just over 10 for now.

Cyclic Pitch available: this was about 10 degrees. I brought mine down to about 6 degrees.

I adjusted both of these with swash mixing in my transmitter. Once I spend more time in the air I will bump these back up and get my 16mm arms.

No missing parts:I actually ended up with extra parts in some bags and did not need to open the spares bag.

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