ORIGINAL: swashplate
Common now who else has this bird in hand?
I got one the other day as a step up from my 4#-1 because I was sick and tired of burning out the tail motors (the 1225 motor seems ok so far though) and wanted a belt drive. Now it has to be remembered that I'm a rank beginner at this and have just reached the stage of doing a fairly reasonable (mostly
) hover with the 4#-1 so you more experienced guys mightn't have the one or two problems I've come across. The first thing I did with it was to move the CG forward as described in an earlier post.
I'll skip over the fact that reading the instruction manual I have no idea what PIT is or some of the other techo stuff
but one thing I noticed looking over everything was that the linkages from the flybar were completely different lengths and the allen key needed as part of the adjustment was too small to do the job properly. I ended up using a jeweller's screwdriver in the allen screw.
This same linkage (where it connects to the rotor head) gave a slight problem after what seemed to me to be a fairly minor oops in that the ball joint which screws into the (plastic) linkage with a microscopically small thread simply ripped out. I moved both ball joints to the outer holes which suits me anyway because it should tame it down a little. The same oops caused another problem somehow in that it partly stripped some teeth off the rotor drive gear so it's now out of action until I can get a new gear.
This isn't to say there's anything really wrong with it because I know it's not exactly a beginner's model. The first time I had it trimmed well enough to try for a hover it scared the heck out of me because it so effortlessly and quietly took off like the space shuttle
. When I finally got it up smoothly and into a hover it was just delightful but compared to flying the 4#-1 the rotor seemed as though it was 6 foot wide
. Backing off the throttle just a touch makes it drop like a brick but I suspect that's a combination of less power and losing collective pitch. I'll have to study the manual a bit more to try to figure that out.