4/9/07

Today has been a pretty big day for me. I have tried and failed at getting this silly helicopter to fly with a brushed motor, but hopefully my experience will make things easier for another newbie that thinks brushed motors are the answer.

A brother of a friend, and now a friend of mine indeed, has given me quite a deal on a brushless motor and esc. He is an experienced pilot with 10 years of RC helis under his belt. He recently bought a 400 size heli and wanted more performance than the stock motor would provide, so he made me a deal I could not refuse. The bottom line is I now have a motor that will lift my machine into the air. She didn’t fly on the first attempt because I had my pitch limit set to the lowest setting which gives me about 6 degrees of pitch at full throttle. I made a quick adjustment to no limit watt-so-ever which gives me a 10 or 11 degrees pitch at full throttle and a lower head speed. This setting worked and off to learn to hover I went. Then as my heli begins to defy gravity I realize that in my haste to test my new motor I neglected to put the training gear on my heli. OMG I am flying with no training gear and no real experience. I managed to get her down with no damage and put the gear on. The first battery was videoed by my wife, and I managed to get through the entire battery without a major crash. The second battery proved to be a bit less graceful but I have a pretty good review for the fiberglass blades that come with the stock Walkera 60, if you know watt I mean!

3/19/07

The quest to fly continues. It seems I have worn out my motor while learning how to balance and track the blades and work out other bugs in my heli. At this point in most heli owners lives they decide to upgrade to a brushless motor which requires upgrading to a brushless esc, and of course that will require a Lipo battery which will require a Lipo battery charger. Well I have decided part of my hobby is to spend as little as possible. The above upgrades could easily cost more than I paid for my heli. I have made attempts at rebuilding my motor, but the motor is not really designed for that so I have opted to go with a higher quality brushed motor. The esc I have right now is a bit under rated for the motor, but I am going to cross my fingers and give it a shot.

Bottom line here is my heli is in pretty good shape. The blades are well balanced and track pretty good. As long as I am careful not to flip the norm/reverse switch on my gyro she doesn’t spin like a dog chasing her tail. This means when my motor comes in and is mounted with a nice mesh between the pinion gear and main gear my bird will actually fly. The big question is will I be able to keep my cool and lift her into the air? It has been a long time coming and I must say this hobby has turned out to be much different that watt I first expected. If you are reading this and trying to decided whether you want to get into the hobby or not read on down the page. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am spending a lot more time learning how to work on RC Helicopters than I am flying them. Let’s see… three months working on it; zero time flying it. But I must say I am a-twitter with the expectations of actually flying, and amazingly enough I am the kind of person that enjoys tinkering with things so I have actually enjoyed getting to this point. The new motor is coming US Mail because that is the cheapest and I am cheap. There! I said it! (as if I have not been saying it all along) See you when the new rubber band comes in! Watt kind of motor is it you ask? Stay tuned…

2-11-07

I have had more time to look at and use the newfound manual.  This is by far one of the highlights in my RC helicopter experience. I am starting over using this manual to get my heli setup as it should be.  It still may not lift off of the ground when all is said and done, but at least I will know I am starting with a properly tuned heli. My goal is to get this thing to fly stock out of the box.  I don’t give up easily.

1-29-07

Well I am sure you are as anxious to read about my first crash as I am to avoid it, but that will have to wait. First things first. You have to be able to get your helicopter off of the ground before you can crash it. Well not really. You can get it almost off of the ground and watch it spin wildly while trying hopelessly to trim the yaw and adjust the Tx, and pray it doesn’t smash into the furniture.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I mentioned that I made a pitch gauge from a printout. Well I went ahead and got a real one that is spring loaded. Way better! An accurate pitch gauge told me why the motor had so much more power in full down collective than it did in full up. In full up I had 10 degrees of positive pitch, and in full down I had about four degrees of negative pitch. I have the pitch equalized now to about 9 degrees both ways which makes the motor spin the same speed at full up and full down collective. Another problem solved.

I found instructions on how to balance blades with some common carpentry tools, and learned about static and dynamic balancing in the process. This means I am cheaping out on the blade balancer for now. From what I have heard my heli is pretty far out of balance with no blades at all. Still I have balanced the rotor blades much better than they were from the factory. I did purchase a small balancer for the tail blades but the hex screw was so tight that I bent the allen wrench trying to get it off. That will have to wait until later.

I went on somewhere on this page about changing the position of my battery to get a better CG. That worked out pretty good. Then I realized the battery was slipping down on the platform so I cut a piece of aluminum to make a little stop for the battery. I fastened it down with some zip ties and now the battery stays in place. Further inspection told me that the battery is stopping the movement of the tail servo. Darn’ it. If it isn’t one thing…

Meanwhile I am still trying to get the bird off of the ground. Apparently I have enough pitch but I do not have enough head speed. The motor came with a 13T pinion gear, but a 14T was included as an extra part. Here is where the fun begins. In the process of trying to remove the smaller gear for the larger one I destroyed my motor. So here I am. I don’t have a pinion gear puller yet I managed to get it off. The problem came when I tried to put the new one on. I read on another forum where I could use a c-clamp to press it on the motor. Well now I either have to put my motor back together or buy a new one. I managed to move the shaft enough to bend the top of the motor.

1/19/07

Okay! I’ve had the heli for about a month now. I wanted to go fly as soon as I got it but thought better of it after reading the horror stories on forums. I downloaded the free simulator and spent several weeks just learning how to use the transmitter. I did put on the training gear and try to lift off about three days after I had it but realized I had no control over the darn thing. Back to the sim I went. About a week ago I decided to give it a try again feeling better about my skills with the Transmitter, also know as the Tx. Well I spent a little time adjusting the trim so it would lift of without skidding off to the side or lurching forward and not really to my surprise I could only get 8 inches off of the ground.

I started tying it down to a small table and spinning it up to check out the blade tracking and generally just listen to it and get a feel for how it responded. The blade tracking was off and I was successful at adjusting it to where I was satisfied though I am still at odds with several things. The speed of the motor is very different in normal mode than it is in 3D mode. In normal mode full throttle seems to be much slower than when I am in 3D mode with full down collective. Full up in 3D mode is the same speed as normal mode. This may be right or wrong. I have found other problems that need working out which are way more important than speed variations in the motor.

I made a pitch gauge from a pdf file I found on Heliguy.com and to my surprise the pitch was ok. I then started reading up on flybar paddles and found they should be flat, or zero pitch. Well one of them had a pretty noticeable downward pitch so I adjusted them as well as I could by eye. Now as I sight them when I spin up I notice the flybar disk warps as I increase speed and it seems to be closer to the main blades at the front of the heli. Also as the battery was dying down I stood over the heli and noticed a good deal of vibration. I do not have a blade balancing kit and am really not sure how to go about the warping disk with the flybar as it spins up. I will figure it out! To me this is the hobby. This little heli of mine will surely fly to pieces if it is not tuned perfectly.

One thing I can tell you is this heli is not RTF. On the other hand I am glad I ran across my friends at Heligy.com and I know they will come to my rescue if I hit a brick wall, metaphorically speaking, though very likely with the helicopter as well.

I am making new friends as I venture into this hobby. I was doing a search for helicopter terms and ran across a great website. http://www.heliguy.com/. I checked out the forum to see what kind of tips I could pick up and decided to join. There is a forum topic for my model heli (which is a Walkera Dragonfly # 60 by-the-way) and I quickly found that the folks there are a great asset to a newbie like me. Jimbo has taken me under his wing... or should I say rotor ;~)