RE: "Unofficial" Vulcan 450SE, Pigeon 450, GL450 Thread
Man, I feel like I'm playing with myself here!! 155 hits and no replies!
For those of you looking for information, I've got more. We're still getting it dialed in slowly. Since my original post, I bought a JR7202 transmitter and got all the settings transferred over to it. I'm going to be taking lessons from my son and we're going to use a trainer cord so I'm properly supervised!
Problems so far - the one-way bearing locks up when you spin the rotor head up and put a load on it. I was able to free it by hand after flights, but it would lock up the next time, so autorotation was not possible. I just received a replacement bearing and bearing tool I bought from HeliDirect and swapped the bearing out tonight. works fine now.
I got a "Mega Power" battery off Ebay for $36. 2200mah, 3s, 11.1v. With shipping it was about $45 delivered. HeliDirect sells this battery for around $50 plus shipping. Since then I bought a couple Li-Po's from fmadirect.com. These are great. They're smaller and lighter than all our other Trex 450 size batteries AND they last longer and have more punch. At $47.95 they're not a bad deal. I also bought the FMADirect Cellpro 4s charger - $75. I recommend it highly. Great charger and a reasonable price. It has numerous modes, and will safely fast-charge a li-po pack as well as do a slow charge, a 50% charge for storing the battery and it has a cycle to recover a pack that has been over-discharged. There is an optional computer interface so you can view your battery information and charger settings with the PC.
I got a 230watt power supply from a trashed computer at work and built a nice little 12v 9a power supply for the charger. The charger requires 5amps, so if you go the computer power supply route, you'll need a charger of around 200 watts minimum. All I had to buy was a couple screw-post/banana socket connectors and a 10-ohm 10-amp resistor. I put some rubber feet on it too.
I have some short videos of the first real flight, but have not been able to put them on RCVideos yet. Will make a post on the thread when I do.
Now that the days are getting shorter, I'm not getting home with enough daylight to practice hovering. Can't wait for the weekend.
Is there ANYONE else out there flying a Vulcan 450SE??? Building one??? Contemplating the purchase of one?
Over and out for now.