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I bought this little helicopter in the 'January sales' from a trader on E-bay. Cost £120. It is unbelievable really, that you get so much for your money. Includes:
•The fully 'set-up' assembled 'ready to fly helicopter'
•Brushless motor
•Speed controller (ESC)
•Radio control (transmitter, receiver, piezo gyro & 4 digital servos)
•1800 Mah, 11.2 volt, 3 cell LiPo battery, with 12v / 240v charger
•Really helpful (slightly strange English) manual
•Few tools & bits
This is the long awaited replacement for the Kyosho helicopters. I wanted something less scary and cheaper to repair. Parts are very cheap and easy to get. Taking to bits and reassembly quite easy - as I found after my first 'boom strike' (landing too hard, with no training undercarriage caused the blades to hit the boom - writing off both blades, bending mast & feathering shaft and the boom - 4 hours & £20 later its as good as new). There is tons of advice on the internet - so far really good fun. This is not a 'toy' and must be treated with total respect if you want it work properly and cause serious injury. RTF - 'ready to fly' - as written on the box is a bit of an exaggeration, but not to much tinkering is needed to make it so. Custom carry case is a brilliant addition. Will even hold the tranny that comes with the heli.
Initial modifications
I did by a few upgrades straight away. But after my crash decided that i need to get a bit better at flying before a) I will be able to tell any difference and b) not be expensively trashing them! The only official upgrade that i have fitted is the carbon fibre tail boom. Firstly it only costs just over a fiver and secondly it is much stiffer and importantly lighter - allowing me to put less weight in the nose. the pics above show the three other changes that i made straight away. Firstly, the skids don't really stay in place very well, they roll around and the rubber bits dont really hold them still. They might have made it more crash resistant (thinking about my early boom strike), but I did not feel that it weas satisfactory, so I drilled some small holes through the plastic and aluminium skids & put some self tappers in. The next thing i found was that the carbon fibre bar that holds the body on kept sliding, so i put some small collars on the inside - as shown in the second picture. Thirdly I put some lead weight in the nose to balance the weight (see lego balancer below). it needed about 25g with the carbon tail. This stops the heli from wanting to fly backwards all of the time. The battery needs to be quite far forward and is hard to keef from moving from side to side, so i put a thin (cut down) velcro strap from Maplins through the little slots in the side of the frame. This arrangement can be seen in some of the photos on this page.
Setting up
The helicopter comes with its own transmitter. This is fine, but if i had a transmitter for every model that I have, I would have rather a lot. Plus I wanted to be able to experiment with things like pitch curve and transmitter gyro rates etc at some point, so I decided to use one of the model memories on Futaba FF9 computer radio (my favourite one).
The channel assignment is as follows:
* Ch1 Aileron (roll left / right) right stick left to right
* Ch2 Elevator (rock backwards / forwards) right stick down and up
* Ch3 Speed controller (start / stop / speed) left stick (also collective)
* Ch4 Gyro (which is then plugged into the rudder servo) left sick left/right
* Ch5 not use at this stage (gyro gain at some point)
* Ch6 Pitch (collective - i.e. move the blades up to give lift) left stick up/down
The Type of swash plate is called 'HELI(SR-3)' when setting up the model type on the radio. This took a while for me to figure out. The three servos all work together to move the swash plate around:
* the servo plugged into Ch2 links to the front of the swash plate
* the servo plugged into Ch6 links to rear left of the swash plate (if standing behind the heli)
* the servo plugged into Ch1 links to the servo on the rear left of the swash plate (as viewed from behind the helicopter).
It is important to plus the servos in to the right places - as the Futaba ordering is different to the E-sky one. The next few pictures show some of the important screens for a basic set up that works.
I have the optional settings - like pitch and throttle curves at factory default settings for now. The only other thing to be aware of is that that the hover pitch (how loud the thing is screeming before you take off - balancing precision against stability) is controlled by the VRC dial (the left round black knob on the tranny). Unlike the E-sky transmitter, i have not activated the 'idle up' (the factory default on the futaba does not activate this). On the E-sky they do (switch on the top left). This instantly puts the motor at full speed - either stripping your gears, or trying to take you head off! This is meant for flying upside down. Not really needed for this entry level model in my view, anyone who can do this would probably be using a better radio and helicopter anyway!
The gyro setting is quite important. Both the directon - get this wrong and it will accentuate movements, rather than dampen them - and the gain (how much it tries to correct), too little and it won't have much effect and too much and the tail will fight itself and oscilate. When it is switched on it will falsh while it claibrates itself, the helicopter must be left still while this happens. When it is happy the light will stay a constant red. If it blinks on and off about once a second then it is not functioning properly and the rudder servo will not work. You can try starting again, but I think that it means somthing is wrong. I ended up adding a servo extension wire between the gyro and reciever & it seemed to fix it (ie it was a dodgy connection probably), centering the servo (ie neutralising the trim) seemed to sort it on another occasion - but it doesn't always make me do this. It's been fine after the first week. I sent off for a head lock gyro (the still cheap) E-sky one, perhaps I'll have more luck with that.
Physical set-up
I read somewhere that RTF stands for 'ready to fail' rather than 'ready to fly'! Perhaps this is a little unkind but I know what they mean. You can't argue with the price & as they say you get what you pay for. But with a few minor tweaks this heli is ready to take to the skies ... safely.
Thje main things that I did were:
1. Balance the blades - using fine scales from Maplin (£30) and aeroplane film
2. Track the blades - on the 'lazy susan' cake icing wheel from IKEA (£5)
3. Position the tail servo - so that it needed hardly any trim to centre
2. Balance the whole thing (the battery is much too light)
I made some use of lego in the proceedings. The pictures are fairly self evident of what I did.
I did buy a see-saw balancer, but there is a bit of a problem with this. it only balances the blades statically - ie when they are not spinning - which is not really much good. So following some really helpfll guidance on the internet, I used another method. This gets the centres of mass in the same place - as well as making sure that both blades weigh the same. It is very easy:
1. But red tape on one blade, black on the other, one further in than the other, this will help with tracking later. I used the very light self adhesive film for aeroplanes.
2. Weigh both blades on the scales (mine from Maplins go to 0.01 of a gram)
3. Mark the centre of gravity (mass) of the heavy blade by balancing on somthing thin - I used lego - see pics above. This allowed me to keep the blade straight and gave me a line to mark (beween the bricks).
4. Line the blades up against each other and copy the c of g from the heavy one to the lighter one.
5. Put the other blade back on scales and add (but dont stick) a big enough strip of white self adhesive film to bring it up to the same weight as the other blade.
Tip 1: the scales measure consistently if you roughly put the c of g of the blades at the centre of scale.
Tip 2: don't leave anything on the scales for more than a few seconds, as they will start to 'wander'. Taking the blades off frequently, lets the scales calibrate back to zero.
6. But the lighter blade on your balancer (in my case lego roof brick), with the c of g you just marked lined up to the centre point.
7. See where you need to put the tape you just cut in order for the blade to balance. Keep the tape upside down until you are happy.
8. Stick the white tape round the blade at the right point. Try to make sure that you have no forward facing ends of the tape - as the wind on the rotors might make this want to come off.
9. Re-check weight balance etc.
10. This is now done. The blades should't be too loose (able to fall under thier own weight - or too tight (won't move at all).
