ORIGINAL: ahamay
ORIGINAL: mmurray70
Hey guys, I havent been on here much in the past year. been really busy with work lately and havent had as much time for helis. Plus ive been spending more time practicing on my mcpx since its so much more crash forgiving.
Anyway Ive been having some issues with my 450. I crashed it for the first time last year and rebuilt it with a whole new head from HK and some blades from e-bay. E-bay seller ripped me off and sent wood blades instead of glass. But I tried them anyway and it seemed to fly fairly well actually. This year the first time I took it out I had major issues with the tail drifting. Im running a HK-401 and HK 9257 servo. After my first run this year I came back home and did some research online only to realize I had it in rate mode and didnt realize. Assumed that was the problem but a few weeks later I tried again and still had some major tail drift. Im after doing more research and found that some people have had issues with vibration throwing it off. My wooden blades were a little off balance so i put a nice new balanced set of fiberglass blades and now it runs much smoother but still drifts. I found a video on youtube about setting up linkages and the gyro. Tried that and ended up with a huge tail wag and still some drift. Starting to get frustrated with it. Especially since it flew fine last year. Have a few questions.
Should I set my linkages so that I have zero pitch on the tail blades with the servo centered? Or should I set it with some pitch so that the servo is close to center while hovering? Video suggested no pitch with servo cenered but sort of makes sense to be closer to center while hovering.
Should headspeed affect tail drift? I get a slight drift one way in idle up 1 and it actually drifts the other way when in idle up 2 which is set at a slightly higher headspeed. Also tends to change as the battery drops a little. Does this make any sense?
Can anybody give me some pointers to get this thing flying straight again?
Welcome to the wonderfull world of tinkering....
Imay be able to give you a few things to try as I've been down this road before... so to speak.
First thing would be to take the 4 screws out of your gyro and crack it open and make sure the board is secure. This was an issue with these gyros moving around inside the case. This may have been dislodged when you crashed and may cause a drift.
You'll want to fine tune the drift in rate mode but I would highly recommend flying in heading hold mode.
With regards to the tail. You should be able to set your servo horn at 90 and set your tail blades at 0 pitch in rate mode. Put it into a hover... if the tail drifts on it's own adjust the linkage (or slide the servo on the boom) to put some pitch to counter the drift. You may need to do this a few times. Once you have no drift, then switch back to heading hold mode and fly. Also adjust your servo travel limits in rate mode to get as much travel on the tail slider before it binds.
Make sure you have no sub trim on the rudder via your radio, and make sure you have not accidently added trim via your radio buttons...this will bugger up your gyro and may cause drifting.
With regards to headspeed... you'll want to set less % gain in idle up than in normal as you have higher headspeed and more tail authority. Even less gain will be required if your headspeed is faster again in idle up 2.
We all had mixed results with the hk401's as the early ones were ok but the later ones were rubbish. Investing in a better gyro would be a recommendation. With all the FBL stuff around now you could pick up a decend gyro for flybar very cheap.
Hope that helps. Plenty of people here to help you get it sorted so just post up.
Jonesy