trace
05-19-2006, 11:00 PM
Well crud, ended up stuffing my backup bird this afternoon really hard. A combination of dumb thumbs and fidly equipment too low to recover.
I have been practicing my inverted hover on my nitro birds and today was no different. My backup bird is an older Falcon SE v1 with a torque tube upgrade, carbon blades, the older metal/composite swashplate, but I have been running a worn out Arcamax with a analog servo for the tail. This old gyro never has liked this bird much, it drift a little this way and then drifts a little that way, but you can fly it and it does a good job of shooting autos. I was inverted and worked my way down to about 10 feet having to fly the cyclic and the rudder. Stayed there for a bit and decided I had just about worn out my welcome so I added some negative collective to climb out, it started climbing, I pulled back to flip out and just as I was fully vertical the tail let go 90 deg. I don't know how to piro flip yet and since I had full aft cyclic when it let go the heli was twisting and falling rather than continuing to flip out, I wasn't fast enough to catch it and it hit mostly nose down.
Now the really fun part. Just as it was hitting I hit throttle hold, but it didn't help. When it hit it ripped the battery and the rx off the tray and they separated from the heli, the throttle got jammed full open and the funky chicken from hell ensued. It was a pretty wild funky chicken, the head was digging a trench in the ground and loading the engine enough that it was not overspeeding, but I couldn't get to it because it would jump and flail, finally the clutch let go, the engine oversped and finally seized. I brought all the pieces I could find home and I'll go through it later, but I think it's probably a total write off.
I'm just glad it wasn't my raven that has all the good stuff on it. I hope everyone else has a better weekend than this.
I have been practicing my inverted hover on my nitro birds and today was no different. My backup bird is an older Falcon SE v1 with a torque tube upgrade, carbon blades, the older metal/composite swashplate, but I have been running a worn out Arcamax with a analog servo for the tail. This old gyro never has liked this bird much, it drift a little this way and then drifts a little that way, but you can fly it and it does a good job of shooting autos. I was inverted and worked my way down to about 10 feet having to fly the cyclic and the rudder. Stayed there for a bit and decided I had just about worn out my welcome so I added some negative collective to climb out, it started climbing, I pulled back to flip out and just as I was fully vertical the tail let go 90 deg. I don't know how to piro flip yet and since I had full aft cyclic when it let go the heli was twisting and falling rather than continuing to flip out, I wasn't fast enough to catch it and it hit mostly nose down.
Now the really fun part. Just as it was hitting I hit throttle hold, but it didn't help. When it hit it ripped the battery and the rx off the tray and they separated from the heli, the throttle got jammed full open and the funky chicken from hell ensued. It was a pretty wild funky chicken, the head was digging a trench in the ground and loading the engine enough that it was not overspeeding, but I couldn't get to it because it would jump and flail, finally the clutch let go, the engine oversped and finally seized. I brought all the pieces I could find home and I'll go through it later, but I think it's probably a total write off.
I'm just glad it wasn't my raven that has all the good stuff on it. I hope everyone else has a better weekend than this.