As I noted, I completed the rebuild of the HDX 500se and she is ready for flight testing, possibly as early as tomorrow. She was one of my best flyers before her frame failed in flight and then the whole seizure thing. But those things are resolved!
Back in Mississippi this summer, sometime in late July I think, I was flying my Trex 600e Pro when the elevator control rod separated from the ball clevis and she performed a jaw dropping flip from thirty feet, ass over teakettle, landing hard on her gear. It snapped her landing gear and ripped the tail boom off, fractured the main blades, but the frame was intact and unharmed. It was an impressive crash and I would have sworn I blogged the incident but I can't find the entry. I mentioned that I had noticed the ball Clovis was loose and needed to be addressed when I was in the middle of another repair, and I never got back to it. I missed it in preflight, launched, got up to altitude and initiated a turn. As I was coming out of it, BAM! It was over in an instance. Someone asked me if I did it because it was spectacular 3D, but I immediately recognized what had gone wrong, and on post crash the clevis was unscrewed, not ripped, off the elevator, and the motion it did in flight was clearly full up elevator. I took her home and stripped off the broken bits, ordered the new ones, and packed them away as they arrived as it was the week I moved back home to New Hampshire. Some of the last parts arrived here, and I set them aside. I didn't fly or work on much as I was in a bit of a funk for the next couple of months, but since I started my new job I am renewed, flying and rebuilding everything.
I pulled out all the new parts and inventoried them.
The intact main frame and the inventoried parts. I put the new gear struts and skids on today. Tomorrow I will start with both sets of main bearings, which were going bad when I bought her, then set up the tail power take-off, torque tube, and tail assembly, which I had to completely disassemble. This will be followed by the main rotor and CCPM, etc. this may take several days. She too was an excellent flyer and I am sure she will fly as well again!
Step one!
Posted with Blogsy
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