Hey thecheatscalc,
The gears seem to pass the paper-test and when I turn the rotor, everything seems very smooth. When I'm on the ground after landing and cut throttle, it auto-rotates for 8 to 10 secs before coming to a stop, with 0 degrees pitch. Does that sound about right? The motor is 3200KV and (from counting) has a 12T or 13T pinion on it. I don't know it's exact specs but it is brushless and seems to provide plenty of power. There's not much specs about it on RC Expert's site.
From just listening to it, the head-speed around half stick (where it hovers comfortably) seems about right and the same as other T-Rexes I've listened to in several movies I got off the web. I don't have a tachometer, so I can't give you exact figures. I don't have a pitch-gauge either and adjusted the 0-degree point by spooling it up a bit and adjusting the pitch center-point to where there's as little wind from either side of the rotor as possible. This is also very close to the mechanical center-point, as shown in the manual. Made that 50% of pitch servo-travel in my TX and used the throttle and pitch-curves from
http://www.trextuning.com/setuptrex.htm
As I said, that brings it into a nice hover, 0.5 to 1 meter off the ground around half stick. I emptied all of my 4 flight-packs this evening and must have had it in the air for at least 40 minutes total. Tried to give it a bit more head-speed and decrease the pitch a little, but that didn't help much. With the heat-sink on, it gets too hot to touch and starts to emit that familiar smell you get from overheating transformers after just 4 minutes of hovering. It also worries me that the motor gets very hot reasonably fast when spooling up at 0 degree pitch and leaving it running at 50% power for a few minutes. Do you have any experience with the Align BL-420LF 3200KV brushless on a T-Rex 450X? Does it have enough power and which pinion would be best to use? I'm planning on giving that one a try. If you have any other tips after reading the above, let me know. Thanks!
Grtz,
Traveller