The flying monkeys got me...

Helis and fixed wing

AMA 957918
IRCHA 4345
AMA Intro Pilot Instructor

Pirate Kid Skeleton by RadDezigns.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Preflight/Reprogram Tarot ZYX

 
Spent a part of the afternoon revisiting the settings on the Tarot ZYZ on my EXI 450 fbl. In preflight refit I noticed the swash was reversed, though pitch and roll were fine. Along the way the collective and cycli controls on the radio reversed, they were right, but lef was right. Cray-cray. Not sure how I resolved it, but worked the normal-reverse combinations of the swash servos and somehow it resolved. I did re-establish the Pitch servo-Ch1/aileron-Ch2 relationships, as they may have been reversed, and that may have been the problem. I am pretty sure it was fine when I last flew her, kind odd. It was one of those situations where I did a bunch of differnt combinations of fixes and stopped when the problem resolved. I also noted the picth went +/- 18 degrees, and reprogrammed the FBL computer to +/- 14. It was fun relearning the programming, took me a while to remember the collective gets set in the FBL and not the transmitter.
 
I took the heli up to the big bedroom, shooed out the cats that followed, and spun her up. I had made the mistake of charging my batteries when I was flying in Dayton almost a year ago, so my batteries were not stored at 3.8V. I may have rendered them unusable... a couple were puffed, old ones, and I am disposing of them, but the newer ones I think I can recondition. Point being, it ran briefly but between programming and checking her blade tracking at zero pitch, by the time I tried to hover her the battery ran out of juice. I out another battery on he, but i wasn't really comfortable hovering her in the bedroom so just rechecked the setting and made sure she was stable at fill throttle in zero pitch, then shut her down.
 
It was nice getting back to the flight bench! I need to repair the Sopwith the cat landed on, my next project.
 
Need warmer weather, then to find a field and fly!