Mechanical machines are always repairable. That's the beauty with rc seat belts and helmets not required

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one thing I noticed Beaver is getting faster at repairing every time

 

I'd be right in the middle of it if I wasn't running karaoke tonight. I'll get back on it tomorrow night.

 

Four hours worth of work including all adjustments of setup.
I put a DFC (shorter) main shaft on with the standard fbl head, shortened the head links and dropped swash neutral just a tad. Full range collective and cyclic movement at the swash with no binding or interference with frame or head due to the shorter main shaft.
Two servos repaired: one needed gears, and the other needed the motor replaced. That was unexpected time spent.
All said and done, it's ready for the air again..... or at least a good test flight to start with.

 

How did you replace the motor @Beaver? That would have been very tough to do? Never had to change a motor yet and do not look forward to it.

 

Was thinking the exact same thing .would the wires have to be soldered ? Sounds like fiddly work

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Soldering isn't difficult as long as leads and terminals are pre-tinned........ then its just a matter of touching the wires to the terminals and applying heat till they melt together.... Then hold till cooled.
Motor is easy to get at, especially on that elevator servo where the back of the servo is sticking out the side of the model. Takes all of 5 minutes if a motor is already on standby, but I actually had to take several old motors apart to make one good one and then install it, so it took a bit longer this time.
It with be time to order another batch of new servos. I have pretty much expended all the good used parts I had left.

 

@Beaver , do the servo saver mod on all ur swash servos and not have to worry about breaking servo gears. It's ok for this learning stage n u can change to the tuff arms when u do hard smak later on. Just make sure u blue threadlock the screw when fixing the arm on the servo.

 

I thought servo savers were just for r/c cars. Besides.... at $5 each, the TGY90S servos will suffice a bit longer. They usually hold up through a few crashes before I have to start replacing parts.... certainly tougher than the $25 Hitec servos I tried a month or so ago. I just need to order a new batch of servos to have on standby.

 

They were almost mandatory for us micro guys to prevent killing servos every crash, something for free whats not to like. Beats repair/replace gears, it's as easy as moving the arms back in position.

 

So anyway....
450 is back up and running. It was a bit rainy today, but I got a test flight in. All is well except that I didn't have a matched pair of blades on, so head was slightly off balance. I have to go through my main blades tonight and get things balanced.

 

I'll have to look those up. So servo savers don't have any "give" under normal operating conditions? What kind do you recommend?

 

This is what i mean http://helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=383105 . There's almost no difference than running a normal arm just that it slips in a crash, you just remove the arm and replace in the correct position. Definitely not recommended for doing hard 3d but no problem for sport n light stuff.

 

Let us know how this works out for you Beaver, if it can save a bit of $$$, why not?

 

I definitely don't do hard 3D...... yet.
That's an interesting little mod.... simple enough.
The black plastic arms I'm using do fit pretty tight. As long as they're still fairly tight after the cut, I might give it a try.
I might have to sacrifice an arm in a stress test just to see how they hold. I would hate to have one of those let go in the middle of a flip or something.

 

Wow. ..... I don't know if it's the wind being more turbulant today or if my setup is off, but the 450 is acting loose and squirrelly today. I'll be checking the setup for sure!

 

Dammit. One of my 2S Lipos suffered a failure. The positive lead broke from the tab on the pack. The bad thing is that there isn't enough tab left on the pack to solder it back.
This may however, explain that seemingly random power glitch that I've been getting on occasion, but not making any correlation to a specific pack.

 

I've heard of reports of such things happening, usually caused by bad solder and vibes.

 

Hard to say. It could have been vibration. On inspection, the inside of the pack was well packed with dampening material, and the tab itself fractured instead of the solder letting go. I might be able to save it, I just haven't had a chance to dig into it and see if I can expose another few millimeters of terminal tab, which requires stripping the rest of the foam packing from the end of the pack. It would be unfortunate to have to deadline a perfectly good pack.

 

I finally decided to experiment with the bank switching of governor speeds. Although the yellow K- bar allegedly has no functioning governor (does not read sensor input?) despite the parameters are still programmable, I managed to use the two banks to switch the fixed governor speed on at 50% throttle in bank 0 (bank 1) and to full throttle in bank 3 (bank 2). I've set all trims and agility settings identical for both banks and increased the collective throw a bit. The throttle percentage remains consistent whether using 2S or 3S, so I have two speeds with either voltage.
It will be an interesting experiment for me as far as comparing flight characteristics at different head speeds while also monitoring flight times and LiPo discharge. I probably won't like the 50% throttle on the 2S packs, but I'll try it just for fun.