evdreamer

Jreue,

Yes, the actual pitch is more important than what the pitch curves are. If you won't chop the throttle if you panic I would recommend you set it up for 3D and not have to worry about changing settings later. I have -10 to +10 degrees of pitch for Normal through idle up 2.

Guys,

I got my servo controller perfected. I tried every spare servo I could get my hands on and tested it out. It is pretty fun and will make a great setup tool for me.

Nick

rotarydoc

Hey guys,

Well, I finally got out and flew a couple of packs!

I wasn't as rusty as I imagined, for how long it's been since I flew, after a couple of minutes I was back to where I left off....

Nick,

Glad to here you got a nice battery, and it charges fast...cool! Did you get out and actually fly ?

I can't picture the fuel adapters, but I think I had something similar back in the Cobra days...

Hope everyone is having a nice weekend!

Glenn

evdreamer

Glenn,

Good to hear you got to fly. Yeah, I flew once yesterday with my new battery in my backyard.

Here is the fuel connectors I was talking about. http://www.helidirect.com/great-plan...set-p-6631.hdx

Nick

rotarydoc

Nick,

Yeah, it felt great to get out and fly again...even though it was only a couple of packs...

I heard a faint rattling noise from the 450 Pro, I'm wondering if that is the motor bearings starting to go again...

If so, it's all good, I still have the Scorpion standing by from last year...lol...but it's going to take a few mods to get it in there, I believe I have to dremel the motor screw holes, I hate to do that, but I don't see myself going back to the Align motor, if it is the bearing failure again, that's even worse than the B400 bearings, plus it's nearly impossible to get those motors apart, as far as I can see.

Rain today, so no more flying. The weather looks OK for the rest of the week, but not great. Looks like mid 40's, but it's harder now to get out at lunchtime and fly, they are keeping closer tabs on hour lunch hours lately..lol...[X(]

I'd rather save my longer lunches for some really nice weather. My hands still got pretty cold even though it was 45 yesterday.

I see now, that is the exact same setup I had on the Cobra fuel bottle/refill system, makes life a lot easier! Hasn't changed much in 20 years...lol.

Hope you're enjoying the new O-scope, and experimenting with the serovs, pots and what not...

Glenn

evdreamer

Glenn,

I saw an Align motor disassembled and the tops are screwed on, but I don't know if they use loctite in that or not. I wouldn't know how to unscrew one without damaging it.

Yeah I am enjoying the O-Scope. I am working on a communication system right now, so later I can hook it up to a RS-232 chip and communicate with my computer. My O-Scope showed I am transmitting the correct data, but I am having trouble receiving it.

I plan on going to my indoor fun fly and pay for my membership later today.

Nick

jroo

Hey all,

Nice day today. I bought some land about a year ago in the texas hill country and the family and I drove out there today. I took the heli because I could fly a bit on the road in front of our lot. I hovered 1 pack and everything seemed ok. The tail seemed a little unresponsive at times though. Well I had 3 packs to burn and I was having a good time. Second pack on. Started her up and it just felt odd. Got off the ground and she started a very slow spin; I tried to correct but it seemed to be unresponsive. Well over she went. Iwas only about 4 ft up and it crashed in the tall grass. 1 rotor blade is shattered, the other seems fine. At first glance, I don't see any more damage, but I have yet to give it a good look.

Well driving home I was thinking about what caused it and it dawned on me. I rebuild my tail last week and noticed that the tail pitch slider was not as smooth as it should be. It was pretty gritty. Moving the tail pitch slider by hand was not, as Finless states, 'smooth as glass'. I did a rush job and I paid the price; defineltly. Ican only imagine it bound to one side and I could not get it back.

At first, I started I started to blame the stock EFlite tail servo, But i've flown over 20 packs on this bird and have yet to feel this type of unresponsivness.

I hope everyone had a great weekend.

I'll be repairing tonight. Plus, my new Align 250 is one its way. I should be getting it about Tuesday I suppose.
Yaw!!

JPEE

Hello Boys,

Well I finished working that HC 500 for a guy. I "no likey". It is your typicle budget heli. The main frames were metal and every edge on that puppy is/was sharp. So I used gorilla tape over the edges where he had run the wires which were already starting to chaffe. Anyways I got the throttle set on this JR radio from the devil. Then I bumped up the pitch to help get it off the ground a bit sooner than normal. I took out it this morning for a test flight at the club which (he the heli owner) lives a mile away. I made half of a pack and called it done. I took it to his house and did some limited flying in his front yard. He was happy and I was happy to be done. But when you get a $57.00 air frame, it shows compared to a Align 500. BUT it does get a newbe in for a little cost.
There were three guys ahead of me to fly. But I was there in short shirt and freezing! So they were cool and let me go to the head of the flight line and do my 2 minute flight which is all I needed to make sure the ship was worthy. It is a bone chilling 58 degrees here!!!!!!!!!!!!! and now raining and will be for four days. So it in the garage shop doing some clean up, you know that stuff kinda slips away from time to time. LOL

Nick, sounds like your having furn with new 0-scope.

Glenn, glad you got a pack or two in as well.

JPEE

evdreamer

Jreue,

Sorry you had a mishap. When my pitch slider isn't smooth I sometimes take the blades and pitch slider off. Then I let the motor spin slow and I put a paper towel on the tail shaft for awhile. Then I put everything back together and put some Tri-Flow on the tail shaft.

JPEE,

I also like to use tape on my frames to protect wires and my fuel tank. What type of JR transmitter was it? Do I need to send my winter jacket down to you.

Nick

JPEE

Nick, I don't recall the number now and I gave it back so I have no where to check. But it was an FM and he took off the quick change back unit like the cpu and put a ASSIN or something close to that which is a 2.4 gig. This way he take the radio and flie his old FM stuff and now everything new get the 2.4. Then he just carries both packs and snaps in the one for the plane/heli he flies at that moment.
On the rame 1-4. When I built the 500 CF I took 300 wet/dry and sanding the entire frames edges inside and out. But this metal frame is black and if you sand to file the sucker it would look like crap. So I came up with the idea of the gorilla tape. It worked prefectly. But again, someone else built the heli, I was just tweeking it so it would fly LOL.

JPEE

jroo

Couple of questions.

1) Like I said in an earlier post, my pitch curve ranges from -3 to 0 to +5.

9sec240 suggested that I raise my high end pitch....

Does this mean I should strive for a curve of -3, 0, +11?

What does he mean by feel proper on the collective? Is this added sensitivity on the collective too much for a newbie. I can only guess that rather than a gradual acsent, it will shoot up on me now right? A change from +5 to +11 is quite a step.

2) 9sec240 also questioned what my swash mix was. I posted it as
Is this ok to you guys?

evdreamer

Jreue,

Yes, you should get more positive pitch. If you use small stick inputs it won't be that much different than your current setup, except you will have some extra "pop" when you need it.

Your swashmix depends on the amount of cyclic pitch that you want.

Nick

JPEE

Jreue,
What 9 sec is expressing "I think" is; We have our helis set up for 3D. In order to that you need the same pitch degree pos and neg. So like my helis are all at 12 pos for lift and 12 neg for flying inverted and zero at mid stick. Now here is where it gets a bit confusing. Thats where you are with a Dx6i. If you had a DX7 or other radio you can set the pitch separately for Normal, Stunt 1 and Stunt 2. Now back to basic's. All of my helis pitchs are set so I can lift off at say 65-70% throttle and go up and then fly at 80% and up and down as needed. When I am pulling 80% and flying and then make a flip or loop then at the top of the loop I pull the stick back to mid-stick zero pitch just for a momant. That stops the heli from pulling itself down towards the ground while it is upside down so what I do is give it neg down from 50% to 40% towards closing the throttle then that make the pull skyward but only until I am cresting the loop and as soon as I am on the my way back down I am again then pushing the stick forward to start lifting again.
With this setting you do have to be careful when landing as when the helis starts coming down and your closing the throttle down you are also creating neg pitch towards the heli and it is flying downward under power. This is where panicky pilots crash. He is coming down and freaks for whatever reason so he slams the throttle closed which drives the heli into the dirt.
If you want to fly with just your 3 degree neg that works and that kind of protects you from yourself. BUT..... I believe..............that if you learn to fly one way and then have to go back later and now learn the rightway your wasting time and learning bad habits in between.

Swash mix looks good! The higher the number that faster the heli responds

It is hard to write all of this and I am more than willing to chat on the phone with you a computer IM or Skpye to give you a depper understanding.

JPEE

evdreamer

Guys,

I tricked my charger into thinking my battery had a bigger capacity, so I could charge it at 10A. It took 12min to charge it this time.

Nick

Aframomum

My Feedback: (10)

Hi Guys,

How's everyone doing??! Had a great time over the holidays and even had a white Christmas, but am glad to be back down south where we really never see snow (its nice to visit but wouldn't want to live in it).

I finally got my Tarot 450 Pro that I ordered after the New Year - about 2 weeks shipping from Hong Kong with no damage. Happy New Year to me!!!



Right now I'm in the early build stages, just loctiting everything and sanding the CF frame. I was able to use Helidirect's holiday free shipping to get the cyclic servo's as well as a new ESC and motor. Went with Hitec's HS-65 servo's and Aligns ESC and 450M motor (Glenn, saw you were having problems with the older can motor Align first came out with, glad to hear you have a 'stand-by' Scorpion ready to go ).

In other news, finished the repairs on my 450 that I crashed back in December but decided that I want to sell it so put it on the shelf while I am building my 450Pro. No need on taking chances with it plus its been to darn cold to fly.

Just wanted to stop by and say hi and give ya'll an update on what's been going on.

Mark

JPEE

Hello Mark,
Great news on getting the new let alone that it was damage free! I don't believe I have ever heard of a Tarot, who make that...or it is company unto itself?

Nick,
Great new on the charger you devil you. Don't you feel bad tricking it...lol. I sence the brightness of twenty lights in the sky very soon.

jroo

Hey Mark
Welcome back! Iwas pretty much out of commision with my Blade 400 for about a month. My stock gyro failed on me so I bought a HK 401B from HobbyKing. It's a pretty amazing, cheap, gyro. I made teh mistake though of going the cheap route on shipping. It took about 30 days to be delivered. All that for only saving about $3. hah. Never be that cheap again!

I bought another used Blade 400 off ebay that came with 2 batteries and 3 Hitech HS65MG servos. I got it all for $220. I kept the servos, batteries, receiver and sold the heli back on ebay as a PNP. I got $177. Hey, not a bad flip eh?!

Last week I pulled the trigger on an Align 250. I got a SWEET deal from flying-hobby.com. I got the Aligh 250 kit which includes the Motor, ESC and 3 cyclic servos for $168! They were running a limited 24 hour special and Igot in!

I also ordered a Turnigy charger, 2 Zippy 800 mAh batteries, and another HK 401B gyro from hobbyking.

I checked the shipping status this morning and they are all in the US, somewhere. Hopefully I will have them tomorrow! I'll post some pics.

I still dont have a servo for the 250 tail. Anyone have any recomendations? Iwas actually going to buy an Align 420 tail servo, but I've been reading some bad reviews. What do you guys think?
Also, what are yalls recomendation for a tail servo for my Blade 400?

Both helis have the HK-401B gyro.

evdreamer

Mark,

Have fun with the new heli.

JPEE,

Yep, one more day. I have been getting a lot of presents that I bought lately. My electronic simulation software came last night, I finally got my new AMA card, I got my RCHeli magazine, and some electronics that I ordered for school.

Jreue,

Hope your heli comes soon.

Nick

rotarydoc

Hey guys,

Nick,

Cool that you can trick you charger into charging at a higher rate, what did ya do to do that? Just adjust up the mAh input?

Sounds like you got all kinds of new goodies!

When is your fun fly that you are going to?

Mark,

Congrats on the new 450 Pro/clone, from what I can make out in the pic, it looks pretty close to the Align frame design...are parts interchangable with the Align parts?

Glad you had a nice vacation for the holidays...and got your fill of snow....lucky you, you can go back down where it's warm (relatively speaking!)...and no snow...

Jreue,

I"ll bet ya can't wait until it all arrives, congrats on the 250...I'm sure you'll enjoy it...

On my Gaui 200 I used a Futaba S3154, and it's been good to me, no complaints at all...very smooth servo.

I run a Futaba 9257 on the B400 tail...it's big and heavy, but it's got alot of torque, and speed. Sometimes a little bit of extra weight is not a bad thing, when you are in the learning stages, the B400 is a light heli to begin with, and the extra grams can help in the wind....

Since it's not a micro servo though, it's not the easiest thing to mount on a B400....

Glenn

evdreamer

Glenn,

Yeah, I increased the mAh to 5000mAh for a 2200mAh battery. The charger limits charging to 2C and my battery can be charged at 5C. I would think Hyperion would make that number higher for their chargers, since they were the first onces to come out with a high charge rate battery.

My indoor fun fly was on Sunday. I got to hang out with my heli friends, which I haven't seen in a couple of months. I was a little rusty, but I pretty much had the gym to myself. All non heli people have to leave after their fun fly and let the 400-450 sized helis fly. Then only one other person was flying and we took turns flying.

Nick

JPEE

Nick,
I am feeling a sugar rush for tmorrow, how about you?


he he he he...........JPEE

evdreamer

JPEE,

I won't have that much sugar tomorrow, but I am glad that I don't have to work tomorrow.

Nick

9sec240

When your head is set up correctly and you have zero pitch at 50% stick, you will have equal amounts of positive and negative pitch available. This means if you have 10 degrees of positive pitch at 100% stick, you should have 10 degrees of negative pitch at 0% stick. If your washout arms or mixing arms are not level at 50% stick, then your pitch ranges will not match. This seems to be the case on your helicopter. You stated:

From 50% stick to 100% stick you have 5 degrees of pitch which means that you net 1 degree for every 10% of the stick movement. With your above stated pitch curve, 0% stick should be 1.5 degrees negative pitch but you are seeing 3 degrees. That tells me something is not correct in the head.

Your swash mix seems to be appropriate for a stock B400 which tells me that something else is fishy. Either your balls are on the inner most hole of the servo arms, your TX is not set up correctly or you are not reading your pitch gauge correctly.

I would try to get a pitch range of -3 to +11 degrees pitch.

As far as feel is concerned. My personal preference is to learn the way the heli "should" be setup. What is the point of learning to fly a helicopter that flies one way only to plan to change the way it flies at a later date? Slow head speeds equal slow collective and cyclic response which should be all anybody really needs to tame things down to learn to fly.

jroo

Awesome information!

Idid adjust the ball links to assist in tracking issues, but I must have screwed something up apparently. Iam going to start from scratch on it. I am going to re-measure all my linkages and start from there.

As far as the linkages attached to the cyclic servo arms. Iput in these new HS-65MG servos, and the arms are so long on the aileron and pitch, I had to cut them or they would run into the canopy mount. They are currently on the 2nd hole from the inside.

I will have to look up the proper distance from the servo screw on the horn to the linkage. Anyone know this offhand?

evdreamer

Jreue,

You just need to find a hole that allows the pushrod to be as straight as possible.

Nick

9sec240

Link measurements are kind of unimportant. What is important is:

1. The swash is level.
2. Washout arms are level at mid stick.
3. Flybar cage is level.
4. Mixing arms are level at mid stick.
5. Zero pitch at mid stick.

Your balls are positioned properly on the servo arms when at mid stick, the links are 90 degrees to the arms and the swash.