Electric heli help

[beason]

I've been looking at these as well, someone pm me with the name of the ebay guy selling them cheep?? i was at a lhs awhile back and they were fling a couple of them. they had more of a bubble cab on them. I'm not sure which it was, but they crashed it into about 10 peices, 5 min later it was snaped back together and fling again...

I'm going to look into the cp pro.

 

[rocknbil]

LOL Smaxxin . . . "welcome to the crash club." Hey with that hard of a hit you probably bent the main shaft too. They're like spaghetti. It can be removed and straightened. You'll have to file a little bit off around the retaining pin hole to get it through the swashplate and bearings, then roll the shaft on a piece of glass to find the bends. Straighten it with a rubber mallet against a wood block. Sure, you'll figure it's only $7 to replace it, but that gets old after about the 6th or 7th one one, especially since you may bend it every time you try to take off for a while . . .

Blades are expendables, get a fair handful and learn to repair them. These two things, the shaft and blades, as well as getting it trimmed out right, are going to be key in getting your first successful flight out of it.

Whatever you do, DO NOT fall for plasti blades or carbon fiber blades until you learn to fly. Balsas will only provide moderate bruises, plasti blades and CF will do major damage, the least of which is chop off the tail boom in a boom strike. CF is nasty poop when it cuts you.

You've already got the links to the EHBG and BCP Repair, there is one other that is going to be very important to you in the first week or two: Radd's School of Rotary Flight. The exercises may seem stupid but trust me, it will save you a lot of money, follow them to the letter.

Happy hovering.

 

[Tarant]

Awsome Rocknbil I completly forgot about Radd's,

I had no idea you flew a CP we should get together sometime. You can fix my blades :jk:

I have a Q, when the manufacturer ultracotes the blades they put the blade into a tube and then heat it up. How do you get yours to stay. do you seal the edge or somthing.

p.s. I am working at the hobby shop in Medford, next time your are down here see if I am their. I am the tall young guy.

 

[sweetdiesel]

A question for the Blade CP veterans. How much wobble is normal for the mainshaft? With the head assembly removed, I have a very slight ~.010-.015 inch wobble in mine when I spool it up. Is this normal?

 

[Tarant]

When it comes to heli 0 wobble should be allowed in the main shaft, and in micros it is even more so. However I dont think that E-Flite makes a straight shaft. out of 4 I have had none were straight. so I switched to this http://www.bladecprepair.com/man_cmg_conversion.html and I have 0 wobble and the shaft is way stronger.

 

[rocknbil]

... when the manufacturer ultracotes the blades they put the blade into a tube and then heat it up. How do you get yours to stay. do you seal the edge or somthing. ....

Pretty much, if you look at that tut you can see I fold the material lengthwise and run the iron down the leading edge to hold it. Then I fold the top over and seal it along the trailing edge, trim the excess to the wood, then repeat for the bottom. With the seam at the trailing edge it never comes up. Then I trim and seal the ends, run the iron over the flats to shrink it up. Most ultracote/econocote/monocote is a tougher material too.

Yeah I'll do that, don't get to Dreadford often but Al's is one of my stops when I do.

How much wobble is normal for the mainshaft?

(CRASH veteran MAYBE ) The more vibration you have the more it will rob it of lift. After some . . . err . . . incidents . . . I spool it up anyway and if it's not wobbling so bad that it won't get airborne, it does smooth out a bit as the headspeed picks up but you can almost feel the loss of lift. I'm in the habit of using up all my good mainshafts then when I put the last one in, I take them all out with a block of wood and bang them all into shape, ready for 6 or 8 more crashes.

 

[SMaxxin]

Update

Friday I took a trip to the hobby shop (hour drive, one way) and bought two sets of blades. I get home slap on a new set of blades and what happens....It tried to shack itself to death.

I tear poop apart and find a bent main shaft. I tried to straighten it but if it's not perfectly straight it will wobble like crazy, when I rolled in on a flat surface it was hard to see where the bend was but it still shook too much. I'm off to the hobby shop in the morning.

 

[SMaxxin]

Finally got it going, went through two packs and started feeling it.......Then tragedy strikes. I got it a few feet off the ground and in the blink of an eye it went down tail first.

What broke?

Main frame right under the servos
Tail boom
Blades
Main gear shaft

This might be the end for a while

Edit: Just looked up the parts I need and it totaled a whopping $15.00. I have blades and main gear shaft so it's not as bad as I thought.

 

[rocknbil]

Sounds to me like a servo failure or a serious glitch? Broke the boom, were you flying CF blades?

The other thing is if those pushrods come off the swashplate it usually drops with a vengeance, although I've never seen it tip like that.

 

[SMaxxin]

Sounds to me like a servo failure or a serious glitch? Broke the boom, were you flying CF blades?

The other thing is if those pushrods come off the swashplate it usually drops with a vengeance, although I've never seen it tip like that.

I was temporarily distracted when it went down....7 year olds tend to do that LOL. After further inspection the boom is not broken, the frame is broken right were the boom meets it. It looks a lot worst than it is but it is put away until the weather gets better.

 

[rocknbil]

LOL . . . when you said "what broke" I read it "what broke to cause the crash?" What a maroon.

ACK that's the worst place to break too. The landing gear mounts like to break there too. When you put on a new frame, be sure you do this mod.

 

[SMaxxin]

Well I finally put it back together today and was determined to fly it...it lasted about 5 minutes LOL. I decided to forget taking my time and just go, it actually went better than I though. I got it up about 10 feet and just concentrated on keeping it in the air, all went well until a little guts of wind made it pitch hard left. If it would have been a little higher I would have saved it....It now sits with broken blades again. I'm about to try the plastic blades....everything else cost a few bucks, the darn blades are the most expensive parts.

 

[rocknbil]

Well, I will advise against this. Strongly. In a hard landing, the blades will flex downward and cause a boom strike. With plasti-blades or carbon fiber blades this will chop off the boom. So now you're back to replacing at least a boom, tail wire harness, and if you can't get the boom out of the frame, a frame. The CF rod is CA'ed in and even soaking it with debonder it's a bitch to get out without damaging the frame as you probably already know.

Now you know why I learned to repair, build, and re-cover my own blades. Hell yeah they are expensive, and it's frustrating as hell. For a while there it was five minutes - broken landing gear. Three minutes, blades. Two minutes, another landing gear. Blades. Gear. Blades. Blades. Gear, Blades. And that was just getting through one pack . . .

As frustrating as it is you just have to be patient with yourself and not fly beyond your ability. If all you can do is tail in hover - go with it until you are able to fly around a bit. I've been at it a year and still can't fly inverted, but I don't dedicate the time to it most do. But being able to do figure 8's is fun for now. It'll come . . .

 

[SMaxxin]

LOL I just experienced replacing the frame and tail boom, yes it's a PITA but both parts are still cheaper than a pair of blades.

I'm either having a hard time getting everything adjusted or the flat bottom blades do not do what I want them to. I'm having a very hard time hovering, it's easier to just take off into forward flight. It feels like it has no lift then all of a sudden it's 5+ feet off of the ground and going left...I can't hover lower than that. I started having this problem when I went to the flat bottom blades but that was also right after a rough crash. I'm going back to the symmetrical blades, I'll give balsa another try, but at $20.00 a set for maybe 5 minutes of use I can't afford to try and fly it much longer.

 

[rocknbil]

.... It feels like it has no lift then all of a sudden it's 5+ feet off of the ground and going left....

This sounds like a sticky collective. The head hangs up a bit then all of a sudden breaks loose and slams upward giving you a steep increase in pitch. Try removing the shims from the feathering shaft. In trying to reduce slop, it can sometimes get too tight. You have to remember the centrifugal force pulls the blades out, if they don't pull out enough, it gets tight and binds against the rubber seals.

Another thing is how are you setting pitch? If the pitch is too steep it will make it very hard to hover.

 

[SMaxxin]

Another thing is how are you setting pitch? If the pitch is too steep it will make it very hard to hover.

I try to get them as close to zero as possible (per instructions). It looks like you were right about my previous crash (I'll learn to listen one day ) I was trying to get everything set up and notice one of the servos had limited motion...it's stripped. I'm guessing this is why I went from a decent hover to no hover.

 

[rocknbil]

That'd do it. Hey if I caught you in time, dump the eFlite servos, they are total crap. You can drop some GWS STD's in there just fine, but I LOVE the Futaba S3110's. The wires are not long enough though, you have to get one extension for the rear-left or patch wires in. I just opened the cases and soldered on new wires. The gears will strip easily if you move them by hand too, but they are faster and much more reliable. Anything is better than the stock eFlite servos.

 

[write2dgray]

Other quality servo choices are the HiTec HS-45s and the BlueBird 306bbs.