Took the shiny off the new Cubby...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

But I still have my record for whoomping every heli I fly at BMF (Bob Miller Field).  I spent about 5 hours flying today, and it was worth every second! But let's start with my taking the shiny off the new Cubby, which I maidened today.

Today is a beautiful day. The winds were very calm with occasional gusts, nothing much. I found myself all alone at BMF, that is until Greg came to cut the grass. I flew the Cubby, and on the first landing bumped her a bit hard. I find I fly better when my hands are shaking, but it makes it tough to land. Not so badly hurt though...

First landing, bent the landing gear and broke the flangey thingy on the starboard strut. They always break. And the little plastic and spring X-shaped shock absorber wanna-be they put between the wheels. Yeah, that broke off too. Those never stay on either. Knocked off the faux cylinder head on the port side, and broke the prop. That was it. Had her up and flying in a few seconds. Flew her, and flew her, and flew her! It was awesome! Great landings, some minor aerobatics, all a good time!  Then I took off on another flight, and she wanted to stay downwind at the south end of the field. It was hard bringing her back upwind, though there wasn't much wind. I just could not get a grip, and so I ended up barrel rolling her firmly into the edge south woods...

Broke her wing clean in half, just like my first Cubby and her bout with the Ents. No other damage though!

McGyver'd her back together, 'cause daddy is out here to fly, dammit. Used a tongue depressor as a spar; it was all I had. Worked pretty good!

Joined the halves together wonderfully with some 3-in-1 glue and some package tape. One of the aileron servo wires had come off the plug, so I had to cut it off and solder a new one together...

Top shows more of the damage...

And here she is, risen, ready to go again!

So, I took her up and flew her fine for about 3 more packs. On that 3rd flight I heard something funny from the engine, like it was cutting out. But it's electric, that can't be good. Brought her in with a very nice landing. Turns out the pinion screws that hold the motor to the mount had vibrated out... Pretty sure I Locktited them during the build, but there they weren't. Motor drilled a bigger hole in the cowl, but other than that no damage done. Fixed in a jiffy. Then my wife calls me and asks me if I am coming home soon for kid patrol. I tell her, "Not unless I crash my Cubby again..."  Wife sends out bad karma... I take off, and something ain't right... Wobbly, not feeling in control. Turn her back to bring her onto final, and suddenly she dives, I pull her up, apply power, she tears upward, I back off power, she stalls, I drop the nose and apply power and before I can finish the F word, she slams full speed into the ground...

At this angle it doesn't look so bad... but... The wing has sheared off the fuse, and the plastic canopy to which it's bolted is fractured in half, and most of her parts came home in a bag...

This is what she looks like on the bench. Wing's broken, all the plastic parts are toast...

Fuse is cracked in the usual place, and the motor is smushed with the prop rotor sheared off.

$25 and a long wait for Hobbypartz to get around to shipping a new motor and the plastic canopy and bits (or Nitroplanes, depending on which is out of stock and which isn't... HP has no shipping charge so sometimes they are out of parts when NP isn't... and they are the same company). I won't see Phoenixcubby's parts until Monday, if I am lucky, and these parts won't be here for another week.  I'll be starting on her repairs tonight.

Oh, and about my EXI 450. It actually was kinda fun until it wasn't. I hovered her up high, about 30 feet, and was doing a pretty good job! For some reason, as I decided to bring her back to the center (she had drifted left) I thought I lost orientation for a moment as she pitched up, then tailed towards the ground. I managed to yaw her around so she hit sideways, avoiding a tail plant, but WHUMP!, she slammed into the ground... Broke the blades, bent the usual main and feathering shafts, and the tail boom has a small S in it if you stare at it. I see that the elevator ball joint came off the servo arm... I had just replaced this ball and added a little CA, but apparently it wasn't enough. I don't think I can blame it on the ball coming off, but I'll tell you, I was doing a really good job hovering for the 3 minutes of flight. I have the parts, but i am waiting on a bunch of 325mm blades to arrive any day now.

I had taken the Alpha out of the car earlier, but Ron had suggested I not solo her yet, and when I planted the Cubby, I put the Alpha back in the car. I had also brought the MX2 in case an instructor came by and could box me on it, but I WAS FLYING ALL DAY ALL BY MYSELF!*  That's okay... there's always tomorrow, if my wife will let me borrow her car again (the MX2 won't fit in the Lexus IS 350, go figure...).

Meanwhile, Greg was still cutting the grass when I left.

* Ron and Craig had been at the field very wicked early and were leaving as I got there...

Hey... what the?

Hey, wait a minute there... is that Jerry Gollot flying my PT-19?

Wiiinnnnddddyyyy.....

Drove all the way out to Bob Miller Field hoping the winds would stay calm, but...

Here's hoping the winds die down... I really want to crash something...

Scare me...

A few years ago we were having dinner at one of those Hibachi places were the pseudo-Japanese cook (in this case he was really Japanese) tosses his knives around entertaining you with faux-danger. Except this guy's knife went flying, but he caught it, and demurely stated, "Scare me..."

I had been setting up Frankenheli's gyro when it became evident that the receiver was browning out and the servos were going nuts as a result*. I pulled the receiver from the CopterX 250 and bound her to Franky to see if that was the problem, and its not (I suspect the new ESC; of course I have no idea where I bought it from...). Anywho, I had to rebind the 250, and since I wasn't going to get to garage hover Franky, I thought I would tune up the 250 and give her a shot, now that I am using dual rates and understand expo better. (The last time I flew her did not go so well...). I also had put one of those Hobby King/Assan mini-MEMS 250 gyros on her and wanted to set that up and flight test her. So I rebound her, and set up her CCPM. I took her out to the garage, where I had to have the door closed due to the high winds outside. This gives me the heebie-jeebies 'cause there is no where to run if things get jiggy. I let her spin up on the ground, checked her tracking (sweetly tight) and then brought her up to a hover. She is a 250, which for heli people means she is exaggeratedly agile and quick in response to control inputs, whether the pilot is or not, and I am not, so that added to the tension. I had her in the center of the garage  in a low hover when I heard a loud POP! and immediately hit Throttle Hold as I saw the blades bouncing off the walls and heli going straight down (suggesting they went at the exact same time). These were brand new never flown fiberglass blades! SCARE ME!

She is undamaged. You can see the blades only damage came from striking the walls and stuff in the garage, and that the roots are cleanly snapped off. The fly-bar is slightly bent as the heli tipped a little when it hit the ground with the rotor momentum still spinning the rotor head.

A close up of the blade roots. I wonder what made them fail the same way at the same time... I was only hovering a little skittishly, though it did required a lot of positive pitch to do so.

Well, after I changed my shorts, I put new CF blades on her and reset up the CCPM, then took her back to the garage for an uneventful though brief proof-of-flight-ready hover. The battery was pretty wiped and I had no charged ones, so I called it a day for the 250. I am glad that once again the mini-MEMS seemed quite stable in controlling the tail (amazing how things work out after I read the manual). 

Man, that truly wigged me out, and my heart is still racing...

* UPDATE (5/3/11, 1545 CST): Turns out it was the tail servo. I bought a knock-off one, a DYS S9065 (a clone of the Futaba S9065). This was the first time it has had power, and I think it was shorted. It got hot and smelled, and responded to inputs variably. When I took it out of the circuit the ESC, receiver and servos work fine. When I put only it in the receiver, everything gets wacky. Bought it on eBay, so its a loss. Ordered a Hitec HSG-5084MG, my favorite tail servo, from Helidirect.

Phoenixcubby Day #3

The resurrection of Phoenixcubby continued today. I need to wait for the canopy before I can do anything else.  When I took the tape off of the wing yesterday, there was still a little dihedral, but this morning the wing was back to its original negative dihedral. I have re-taped it so maybe it will set in permanently this time.

The wing strut attachment point's got pulled in the crash. I have been missing one of the outer attachments since the Tree Incident, and in this crash lost one of the inner attachments.

I cut a piece of plastic from the old wing strut, embedded it in the wing and glued it in place. It will serve as a top to which I can glue the aft wing strut.

Nothing is ever easy... the motor mount did not match exactly, but was pretty close. I used nylon 6-32 3/8" screws I bought this morning at Home Depot. The brass nuts would not fit on the top (the yellow plastic firewall got in the way). I was able to attach the nuts on the bottom of the mount.

A posterior view. All of the screws screwed in nicely so they are not coming loose even without the nuts. I did use a little Locktite, though I don't know how that will work with the nylon...

Phoenixcubby! When the canopy comes I can put the wing on and then complete the landing gear's aft attachment (pics will come when I do. I came up with a fairly ingenious way to dynamically stabilize the aft attachment using a part of the old wing spar). Frankenheli in the background. Put her mini-MEMS gyro on and will be setting that up later this afternoon. May even finally spin her up!

Phoenixcubby Day #2

Today I stopped by my LHS (Orange Grove Hobby Shop) and picked up a roll of Top Flite Econo-cote in Cubby Yellow, and a motor mount to continue my work on resurrecting the Cubby (Click here for Day #1). I decided I didn't want to make the Cubby half red, half yellow... I have not done such an extensive cote job, so it was interesting work. I wasted a lot of the cote when I screwed up the mirror image for the other side of the fuse, but figured it out in the end. The surfaces are pretty irregular, and my lack of skill made for an adequate but not great job. (You can click the pics to see a larger version).

Not a bad job, actually. You can't see the seams and the fit and finish are pretty tight now that I look at it. The color matches the original Cubby paint pretty well. I decided to cover the entire fuselage to provide structural strength, as Greg suggested when I busted her up. You can see the crack seams as I didn't work them out much. Not pictured, I also put some yellow over the middle of the wing where I had put red Ultracote when I originally repaired her after the tree debacle. Wanted more yellow, less red. When I took the tape off that was pulling the wing into a dihedral, it actually had a nice soft dihedral remaining. When I put the stays back on I hope it doesn't pull the wing back down...

The new Exceed Alpha motor doesn't fit the original stock Cubby engine mount. It was a motor-ring-in-a-firewall-ring device. The new motor came with the silver mounting bracket, but it extends beyond the plastic firewall, so it wasn't going to work by itself. I bought another motor mount, the black one, epoxied it into place and set it with screws. That puppy ain't ever coming loose... The motor will be mounted to the silver bracket, and after I find some short counter-sink screws and nuts I can mount the motor mounts together and find out if the cowl will fit over it all. 

Kinda stuck now waiting for the canopy to come from Nitroplanes, notoriously slow shipping. Once that is in, I can finsh the plane. I am working out a plan to stregthen the wheel flange attachement... more on that later.

EXI 450 with Hobby King/Assan mini-MEMS 250 gyro

I rebuilt my EXI 450 after my gyro misadventure... And this time I set it up properly (helps to RTFM, read the frickin' manual...)! Here she awaits her test flight.

I test hovered her in the garage, wanting to keep the flight short because I just spent so much time putting her back together. Rebuilt the tail boom and tail rotor assembly, rebuilt the main rotor head assembly, replaced and re-setup the stripped servo's, reprogrammed the Dx6i, and setup the CCPM. Then I spent a half hour setting up and rechecking the  Hobby King mini-MEMS gyro. Then, it was out to the garage!  Short video clip shot by my 12 yo Luke from a distance with zoom, so apologies for the shakiness of the video.  I totally own the shaky piloting...