Just a quick pic of her in one piece.

After removing and examining the damaged piece, I found that the bottom (grooved) side of the top portion of the belt was rubbing the top of the plastic link. I have the belt as tight as I can by pulling on the tail boom. When flying, I wasn't paying attention to the tail rotor (just the movement of the helicopter), but another club member was. He told me that at certain points, the tail rotor would almost stop. That is most likely the point at which the belt is rubbing the link. I noticed it doing this when spinning it up last week, and set the servo travel to stop it. Upon arrival to the field today, another thing that I forgot to mention in my earlier post that I noticed in addition to the flybar issue, was that the tail belt was a bit loose. I loosened the tail boom mounting screws on the frame, tugged on the boom as much as I could and tightened the screws to secure the boom. After this, I checked the belt tension to find that it was now nice and tight. I now realize that my fatal error was in increasing the range of the rudder servos travel to the left (where I had reduced it before to prevent the rubbing). I had increased the travel only until I saw daylight between the link and the pulley at full left rudder. What I should've done, however, was to have the blades turning just enough to keep the tail rotor spinning, then adjust the left travel until it no longer stopped or slowed down the tail rotor. As soon as the rain clears up (hopefully tomorrow afternoon), I'll take her outside and get that adjusted. If it dries up early enough, I'll take her back out to the field and finish trimming her out and move on to getting comfortable with hovering her in all orientations.

Just for a little bit of fun:
After putting up the Shuttle for the day, I took out my Great Planes 71" wingspan Tiger Moth. Well, the winds were a bit stronger than the Moth likes, but I took her up regardless. I've gotten quite comfortable with doing so, but apparently most of the club's membership has not seen this type of plane fly in the wind. I got her up high and set the throttle to idle. She dang near stayed up there at idle for 2-5 minutes. I felt like I was flying an RC kite. That gave some of the guys a bit of a shock to see a plane fly that slow without stalling. The real fun came when I decided to land it. This is the part where it can kind of tie in to helicopters. On my final approach into the wind, I cut the throttle to idle, but instead of forcing her down or attempting to keep up the airspeed, I allowed her nose to pitch up a bit (usually a big no-no when flying a plane, unless flairing for touchdown. I was about 10 feet off the ground), slowing her down even more (less than walking pace). She slowed down so much, that she was practically hovering in for a landing. I kept it that way, keeping the wings level, and allowed her to "float" straight down for a gentle 3 point landing. One member even shouted to me that "It's not a helicopter!!!". A couple of other members came up to me afterwards and told me that they thought that she was about to stall, drop a wing, and crash. I've done it before, so I knew how she would react. The first time it happened to me was on accident. It scared the pants off of me (all of the club's instructors always warn every new pilot to not let the plane get to slow, and remind us constantly). As you can tell, I've gotten used to it and am now having fun with it. Some of the pilots that saw it the first time, watched me do it again later, and they were all still amazed at how slow she was able to fly. It's one of those things that you kind of have to witness and hear the reactions to get the full effect.

Happy flying.