Axe Headspeed and Pitch settings
 

These past few days I've been chasing a vibration in the Axe and came across some interesting flight characteristics. When I raised one blade to fine tune my tracking, the blades had a higher pitch setting with a lower power (going to the motor) setting. This caused the heli to react very different. Because the head speed was slower, the tail rotor was "fighting" the torque more. Its as if the throttle stick was lower, so there was less power going to the tail rotor. I had to really fly it when the battery was nearly empty. This wasn't nearly as bad before the adjustment.

Also, the motor was heating up a lot more. Slower motor, more amps flowing through it, and not as much air from the internal fan. It was really hot some times. Finally, the strangest thing was, when in forward flight and pulling the nose high to decelerate, the heli made a "wooshing" sound as it seemed to be in its own downwash and took a lot of power to get out of it. Much more than normal. The large increase in power would cause the tail to kick out and become erratic. I don't know if this is because one blade was in the other's turbulent air from the tracking adjustment, or just from the low head speed.

To correct it, I lengthened each push rod from the servos one complete turn. This brought the swashplate higher, which lowered the pitch setting for a given throttle stick setting. It gave me higher head speed (because there was more power going to the motor for each blade pitch increase) and the heli is back to normal now.

Anyone else experience this type of flying behavior?

RE: Axe Headspeed and Pitch settings
 

The same thing happened to me when I first got the heli because it was pretty far out from the factory.

Remember though PilotLight we're only talking about a range of about 10º or so from zero to full throttle. It's a very small amount and doesn't take much for it to be thrown off significantly.

The good thing about the Axe's Hiller style head is there are only 2 places for adjustment. The servo linkage and the pitch links. The servo linkage lengths are listed in the manual so one you get them into spec then you just have to worry about the links. Since the pitch link specs are not listed. You have to estimate them, but you kinda get an idea of their length from changing blade grips right.:eek:

Anyway what I do is since my blades and head are marked when I remove the blades I always put them back on the same side they came off. Also When trackin I always adjust the same side and never touch the link on the other. This makes tracking faster and keeps my pitch curve the same.

RE: Axe Headspeed and Pitch settings
 

Also, PL, if you're decelerating hard enough in your pull-ups, with little enough lift, you can wind up in your own downwash (it's not a stall, aerodynamically it's exactly the opposite in fact. Don't push into that :).