CB100's are here! Damn skittish...

Hey, my CB100's arrived (as did Luke's Micro coaxial, and Aidan's Syma S107). These little guys rock, but boy are they skittish! I broke a rotor blade on the first one, and in replacing the blade the world's tiniest screw popped from my forceps, binked off the tool box over my shoulder and is never to be seen again... Took a while, but I found a similar screw on my S107, cannibalized it from a non-flying part and got it flying again with a replacement blade. 15 minutes later, while flying the other one, I broke the same rotor blade on it... I have replacement blades for the Syma that might work, otherwise its grounded until I can get replacements. Unfortunately there is no Airy Harden II blade for this heli, to my knowledge.  If you look closely you can see the borken blade on the left one, the forward blade.

My new hobby isn't flying heli's, its fixing them...  I will say that sim time made tail in hovering a lot easier, but I am nervous about much more than that as these things are fast.

Helipal Works!

I was worried about buying stuff from Helipal in Hong Kong, but everything I ordered just arrived, in excellent condition, in 7 days. It was well packaged, undamaged, and everything was there. Very nice! This widens the sources for parts. Thanks, Helipal!

Nice Guys at Helidirect!

Thanks, Larry, Customer Service Guy at Helidirect, for helping me out when you could have told me caveat emptor.  Larry has offered to send me the replacement guide set gratis. I really appreciate that support!

I am hoping there is a Jesus nut under the flybar and a simple way to remove the rotor cap so I can replace the guide from the top. If it requires removing the shaft, I think I will have to let it be.

Walkera Quality? But I love this heli... :-(

My Walkera UFLYS arrived today, and right out of the box it had issues. During spin up tests it spun alright, hard to the left. No amount of right rudder compensated for it. Checked the rudder motion, trim and servos, fine. Could not make this work. On further inspection I found that one of the balls and both linkages had separated from the flybar collar. The H guide bar had sheared off one of the guides, making the H an h. I'll need to replace that... I replaced the ball linkage using some loctite, and replaced the linkages. All fixed except the guide, but there is no vibration or instability. Need to figure out how to replace the guide. xheli and Helidirect are both out of the guide sets. But this doesn't account for the spin issue...

I examined the gearing closely, and found the main shaft rotor had 2mm of play because the fixing ring was not properly positioned. This prevented the tail rotor pinion from fully engaging the main gear, preventing the tail rotor from developing adequate headspeed. I removed the securing screw, snugged up the collar, and resecured the fixing screw along with some loctite. Retested the heli and the problem was gone! Until a pin securing one of the tail rotor blade linkages flew off somewhere and the affected blade went rogue, causing the spin to return. I replaced the pin with a piece of paper clip trimmed to fit, and voilà, problem solved again. Tomorrow we try to hover it.

I noticed that at rest the blades fall below the boom. I wonder if during the spinnups if the blades momentarily got stuck below the boom and the horizontal fin, shearing the linkages? Not sure how that would happen. No boom or blade marks.

I hovered the CB180D successfully today in the garage! Time on the simulator is paying off.

Hopefully my UFLYS won't fling itself to pieces. Looking forward to first flight tomorrow if weather permits. Busy first day with the UFLYS...

First Flight

Sort of... The advice is to charge the Lipo fully but to only fly about 3 min, about 5 times, before flying it to full discharge. Well, that 3 minutes was about all it took for me to end up in the bushes and create some minor damage. It was a bit gusty. I had the training gear on. I took it out back just to spin up and run the motors and discharge the battery. It got light on it's feet and skittered off into the vines, while I continued to apply collective, effectively shaving down some of the teeth on the main rotor pinion, so I have a distinct clicking sound as the rotor goes around. Later went in and ordered a couple new ones, but this will work for now. I knew better; when things go to ground let off the collective as fast as you can to prevent such damage. The canopy was difficult to get off the back pegs and the darn thing cracked second time I tried to remove it, about an inch forward of the connection point. I've CA'd it and supported it with a piece of Scotch tape, looks fine and is strong. Not bad for a first days work, eh?

Had downloaded and have been practicing on the FMS free flight simulator; the one that came on the CD with the Esky Tx was an older version, but its available free on line (http://n.ethz.ch/~mmoeller/fms/index_e.html). I could not get it to run beyond 4 gps on my son's supercomputer, but it works fine on the XP and my notebook. I found Clearview's sim for $40(http://rcflightsim.com/index.html. It is amazing, using real 360 pics as the backgound, and it works well on my son's computer. It is proving very useful. I'm using the Esky simulator Tx, which suits it's purpose fine. My CB180D did not come with the expected flt sim cable, and I've asked xheli to send me one. It would be nice to get used to my controller.

Anxious, but really want to get flying!

My Walkera CB180D arrived!

My Walkera CB180D arrived today from xheli.com! Its beautiful, so much so that it scares me to fly it...  It came set up for Mode 2 (Collective/Throttle left, Cyclic right); I was worried I would have to manually change it. It didn't come with a USB interface cable that would have allowed me to use it on the Esky Flight Simulator (see below), thought I though it did.

The Esky RC Flight Simulator also came, and if my first flights are any indication, it will be a few days before I venture out with the Walkera. Practice, practice, practice. Getting used to the 4 channels is the trick. Set up wasn't too much trouble, but I think it was easier because I had seen a set up video from one of the online sellers that helped a lot.

Flight sim time.

Homemade Helipads

I wanted a helipad to protect my rotors, so went online and saw a variety of them, quite expensive. I decided to make some of my own out of some interlocking 2ft x 2 ft foam mat I bought at Lowe's (a pack of 4 2ft x 2 ft sections was $20). Its the kind you find on the floor under gym equipment. I took one and divided it into 4-1 ft x 1 ft sections and made 4 small pads. I took the remaining 3 and made big pads. The one I saw online was a full 4x4, and I suppose I will make one someday, but I can see why they are expensive; they were labor intensive. Once I got a pattern down I could mask a small one in 15 minutes, and the big ones in about 20 minutes. I think the online ones are silk-screened, I masked mine by hand and painted them with a good quality paint for plastic. One of the small ones has some significant bleed over; it was the first one I made. The mat material has a diamond like cross cut in it that allowed some bleed, which I learned to compensate for: several thin coats instead of a couple thicker ones. I made a stencil for the white squares, a small one for the small pads, a big one for the big pads. They look really good! Realize I am a lousy painter, but somehow I managed.  Here are a few close-ups of the helipads.

2 ft x 2 ft

1 ft x 1 ft

The ones with some bleed through I plan to pen in a black border around to cover it up. If it comes out okay, I'll post some photos.  I'm pretty happy with how these turned out!