ptarp

Hey guys, here is video I made of me flying my HB2 last weekend. I had a good time, but I'd say I'm only getting about 70% power because my main gear is chewed up pretty badly.

http://www.tristatedesign.com/tarple...yBee2_5_08.wmv

humveecrusher

Great video and great flying PTarp! That's not bad for onlt 70% power. Are you flying stock?

casipak

My Feedback: (3)

paedbo,
Do you have a brushless main motor installed? For now, I just have the regular 4-in-1. Where should I connect the monitor on it? Once I get the phx 10, I'll reconnect.

rbiasi

paedbo,
You completely discharged the li-po? That's bad. Screws up the chemistry of the pack. Did they get hot or swell?

Or do you mean you ran each cell down to 3.3v?

ptarp

Thanks Its completely stock with a few epoxy fixed parts and a badly chewed main gear (ordered one from deetee but they were backordered). I'm super impressed by this helis flying capability. Before I lost power due to the gear, I was able to go inverted and fly around, but I'd really be pushing it to try in its current state.

rbiasi

paedbo,
Where are you getting CP2 parts from? I want to try the new main gear and rotor head. Are you running the new head assembly? Do you notice an improvement?

ptarp,
Great vid! I waste a lot of main gears myself (and shafts, and frames...). Check out jaghobbies.com. Jim usually has most parts in stock, has good prices, and ships quickly. The best prices for parts is at heli-fever.com (main gear/shaft $4.50), but they're in asia. So the shipping is expensive, but I usually get stuff from them in about a week. Balsa Products also has good prices, but most of their parts seem to be for the FP. Although a lot of the parts are the same.

CrashBurn69

My Feedback: (1)

Can someone give me an idea of what part to order. I slammed my HB2 into the side of my pool today, and afterward when I spin it up, it hops like my grandmothers singer sowing machine. I think I may have bent the main shaft. Do I just order the shaft, or do I order the gear, and the shaft comes on it? Thanks

paedbo

My Feedback: (2)

casipak,

you connect the monitor to the red and black wires coming from the 4 in 1 box, that goes to the batterys ( jst) connector)
what i did was just shave alittle of the insulation off the wires until i could get a bead of solder on them, then soldered the monitor to it ( red to red and black to black) then i just mounted the monitor on top of the 4 in 1 box ( before i went with seperates).

and yes i have a brushless himax 4100 running on 8T pinion, and a brushless fiegao tail motor. (geared) not direct drive

rbiasi, packs were run down to 9 volts, which is 3 volts per cell sorry i didnt mean i ran the packs all the way down.

parts for cp2 can be found here, at the bottom of parts page theres even a barebone cp2 for $70 or $75 http://rc-expert.com/product.php?pid=108


i think electric scooters has cp2 parts also http://www.electric-scooters-motoriz...opterparts.htm

as far as how it flys with the cp2 upgrade i dont know yet, that post i made about buying a cp was just hypothetical if i had bought one just before the cp2 came out i would of just bought the upgrade parts as i was breaking them, but i learned to hover and broke most of my parts before the cp2 came out, now i dont break as many so i have a stock of extra parts that i went crazy buying thinking i was going to go through them fast. but once those are gone ill start getting cp2 stuff. or ill just get the barebone and swap whatever is different over ( main gear, rotor head etc)


crash as far as the main gear, they should come together, here is a link to a site that has honey bee 2 cp parts and shows a pic of the gear http://www.deeteeenterprises.com/NS.....Parts.055.php

rbiasi

Thanks man! A bare bones CP2 is what I've been waiting for. Don't want to get a bunch of stuff I don't need. I'll probably have to wait until my wife is out of town in a couple weeks. Not sure I can explain another heli showing up on the doorstep.

paedbo

My Feedback: (2)

since i went all seperates, i would really like to get my hands on a barebones hummingbird, the one that has the gear driven tail.

I dont even know which hummingbird that is but i had seen pics of it. 3d elite pro maybe???

casipak

My Feedback: (3)

Thanks for the help on the battery. Well, I got my TOYS today. Carbon fiber blades, new charger, power supply, and heatsink for my himax. Everything's great. The cf blades look great and are very durable. They are the same thickness as the stock balsa but there's only one hole in each blade so I'll use a spacer to fill the gap in the blade holders. The charger has a high intensity LED and a loud beeper that warns me when the battery is charged. One interesting thing though. When I connected the 12 v 600 Mah power supply to the charger and hooked up tha bettery, the charger started beeping and the LED kept blinking signaling that the input voltage was higher than normal. It's suppost to be 11-15 v. I plugged in my $20 adapter from wal-mart and hooked up the charger and battery and everything was fine and charging.

Turns out, when I measured the output voltage of my wal-mart adapter while it was hooked up to the charger, it was around 12.83 and it sometimes jumped to 85. When I measured the voltage of the power supply, I got while it was hooked up to the charger, the voltage went up to 16.50 or around that, and indeed the charger wasn't lying, it did get an above normal input voltage even though the power supply says it's a 12 v. I'm not sure why this is happening, but maybe you guys can help me out? I was charging my old battery which I might've discharged down too much, the one with which I get 5 or so minutes of normal flight time and power. Could the problem be in the battery? BUt then how come it works on the wal mart adapter which is also a 12 v 600 Mah just like the power supply?
Or is it a faulty power supply?


ptarp,
very nice video, once I get my blades installed, I'll report back with some feedback.

rbiasi

paedbo,
Since you have the brushless main and tail why not pick up the $69 Hummingbird Elite that kermit posted the link for. Although I don't know if it's really that different from a Honeybee. Seems to be the heli that the honeybee was cloned from. The only Hummingbird with a shaft drive tail is the 3D Pro. Those run $140 barebones (centuryheli.com).

CrashBurn69

My Feedback: (1)

Thanks for the info Paedbo.

paedbo

My Feedback: (2)

crash your welcome ( for what i dont know???? i have a bad memory)

and rbiasi im very happy with the honey bee 2, so i really dont need the hummingbird with the tail motor,

its just i run a gy240 gyro, and the tail is locked however i look at it this way,


you can think of it like this, you have two versions of the honey bee you have the cp and the fp versions right?


this pertains to the main blades, but think about the tail blades, technically you have fixed pitch tail on the honey bee 2 and a motor,

if i was to get the hummingbird elite 3d pro, its not fixed pitch on the tail,

see my honey bee 2 flys great, but hover it and bang on the pitch and she takes off straight up but she also yaws alot because of the lag of the tail motor having to catch up. where with a main gear driven tail i think i would get alot better response time,

Howver i dont think that 3d pro hummingbird comes with servo's, if it did i would probably get it since i would have everything else to go with it, i would have to buy one more servo and use the esky ones, so i think ill just stick with the honey bee 2 and get me an x400 eccpm or trex XL when they come out.


my heli flew alot better today indoors on the 1200mah dymond battery pack i forgot to set the timer on the transmitter when i started to fly I had to adjust the tracking of the blades ( i switched it back to PE blades i like to fly those when im indoors) anyways after properly tracking the blades the heli flew alot better and i would say the battery lasted me at least 12 minutes plus whatever time i took for tracking.)

my triton charger says the battery took another 960mah, which means i was able to fly the heli until it was within 30mah of the battery being at its fully discharged state ( when i first got it i discharged it with triton so i could get a mah count to full charge and it took 995mah)

so now i think out of all the batteries i tried, 1500mah 1200mah and 1000mah, that what they say is true the 1200mah is the most ideal power to weight ratio for the honey bee 2.

i need a heat sink for the himax though, im getting 160F to 170F degrees on a 8T pinion, i read somewhere 100c max for himax which would be 212F

kermitdafrog

rbiasi,

The Hummin' Bird Elite CP arrived at the office today around 3:00 p.m. The quality seems a lot better than my 'Bee. I especially like the boom mount, main blade (allen) screws on the top that are easy to get to, and the aluminum chassis.

I got home about four pm and got the electronics installed by around six pm. This is my second heli. and first eccpm setup. I went with defaults on the Futaba and got it mechanically trimmed enough for a test by around 7:30 and have been fiddling with it since.

I've managed to learn short hovers for the first time ever, and my first impression is "I really like this thing". It's smooth, vibration-free, and eases into a hover without "snatching" it off the ground, but will really leap if you push the collective forward.

I really like it and think it's gonna flatten my learning curve a lot, as I'm already having better luck in 30 minutes than I was with the FP.

I also cut out some blanks tonight, and am going to make a set of main blades this weekend. So far the weight is around 13-14 grams each, but I haven't put the lightening holes in them, or shaped them yet. I was thinking Spanish Cedar was going to be heavier, but I milled them to 135 thousandths thick, same as the stock blades, and that's what I came up with. We'll see what happens.

Rick

ratpoop

My Feedback: (1)

i have a couple of questions about the rear blade/motor set up on my honeybee.

what makes the rear motor "lope" during flight? its seems like the rear motor has a mind of its own sometimes.

also what do you guys recommend for a up grade to the rear blade? i keep loosing the rubber inserts that hold the blade on.
direct drive a good choice? what about the Direct Drive Tail Ducted Fan System?

paedbo

My Feedback: (2)

i tried the direct drive, if you get that edp-50xc kit, just make sure you put the prop on with the shiny side facing the way the wind is supposed to blow, or the prop will be so inefficient youll burn out the tail motor.

anyways after i burned up first motor because of wrong prop orientation the second motor lasted alot longer and the tail was really nice with that direct drive kit. but after i dont know 15 flights that tail motors commutator started to burn up on the 3 cell lipo ( i also think because i was running a heavy 1500mah battery with too low of a headspeed and too much pitch that it caused the tail to work too hard and the DD motor burned out prematurely if i had set up the pitch alittle better to get higher head speed i bet it would of lasted alot longer) , anyways i finally got frustrated and just bought a brushless tail for it.

paedbo

My Feedback: (2)

by the way kermit would you be able to post a picture of the hummingbird you got from deetenterprizes?


im curious to see what it looks like, since all the pics i ever find are like on that web page they show the FP bird generic pic.

humveecrusher

paedbo, thanks for the link to the barebone cp2. That's what I've been looking for too and at a great price.

rbiasi, I'm with ya on a new heli arriving at the door. The wife would...well...you know...lol.

casipak

My Feedback: (3)

I tried out the blades yesterday and I ended up using one of those rubber spacers or whatever from lowes. I cut one of them in half and placed the halves under each blade. I started up the heli and WOW what a difference! The tracking and balancing are superb. The heli is A LOT more stable in flight and it just feels like a brand new heli.



By the way, the guy with my hitec eclipse 7 and the people on ebay who sell them say that they broke the radio handle and that they are crappy. Is it true that the high end radio handles are crappy, just curious because they all say that they brake them while carrying the radio.

rbiasi

kermit,
Glad to hear that you're happy with the HB. That's a great price! Century wants $85 for the FP kit and another $45 for the CP converion. I like the aluminum frame. Anymore my HB2 frames snap if I look at them funny. The frame that came on my carbooon lasted a couple months, but all of the replacements have lasted days. I get one of those boom strikes that flips the blade over and the boom rips the backend of the frame off. I guess I should try to crash less.

ratpoop,
I got tired of those little pieces of fuel line that hold the tail rotor on falling off. So now I put a drop of CA at the tip. Holds it on and if you need to remove it you can scrape it off with a x-acto.

paedbo,
Check out the Hummingbird CP pics on the century website, centuryheli.com. The large pic is a FP, but all of the detail pics are the CP.

kermitdafrog

paedbo,


Could do some pictures but not sure about how to do it on this forum.

I see a place at the bottom of the compose screen that says upload, but not sure where it goes, and how to point to it. My other alternative would be to put it on my homepage, which I would probably have to re-train to do it since it's been so long.

I made a set of semi-symmetrical blades this morning, and they seem to work, but not being a seasoned pilot, can't say for sure ... but it will hover. They came in around 10.3 grams each, (within .1 grams of each other) with the Monocote, and took about two or three hours to do, but I spent part of that doing some headscratching to figure out how. I could probably do another set in under an hour.

Rick

PS, well I guess I accidentaly figured it out, and now know where they upload to:-)

paedbo

My Feedback: (2)

ok thanks kermit i just wanted to see if maybe that hummingbird had better landing gear than the esky, it probably does but the esky is so similar to that,

that is one thing i hate is the poor landing gear on the honey bee 2, you can crash severly one time and theres no damage but another time have a light crash and ruin the landing unit.


it looks good, however i think i like having the paddles above the main rotor though, i have a friend that bought his first heli the same time i did, and hes constantly bending or breaking the fly bars on crashes, up until wednesday of this week i had never lost a fly bar in a crash

my next step will be for a better heli, this one is fun to fly indoors and thats what ill keep it for, maybe occassional outdoor flight.



as far as that tail rubber fuel piece for the tail rotor, if you dont hit stuff with it it wouldnt be popping off, and it popping off is whats saving your tail rotor from being busted.

try using 2 pieces of the fuel tubing or just one longer piece.

kermitdafrog

Nope, the landing gear is about the same except they don't CA any of it , so you have a choice of adhesive, if any, ... I left mine as a friction fit. They recommend white household glue to make repairs easier.

The see-saw is a pretty snug pivot so I gotta figure out what to do about that. I like the adjustable links on the servo arms, the Bee doesn't have them.

Rick

scottyfusion

My Feedback: (1)

does anybody know if ther is any diffrence in the 4 in 1 cotroll boxes between fp and cp they look exactly the same. i want to make my fp a cp i think all i need is a 120 swashplate a third servo and cp blades. then its just a matter of radio. i think the 4 in 1 is the same so all i would need is a 6 channel tx. anyone who has gone futaba and wants to sell or donate there stock 6 channel let me know!

thanks, Scotty