Lack of understanding

[jingles]

To save time and to take the easy way and use others knowledge, can anyone tell me if there are any videos on this site explaining the basics of how a model helicopter flies.
I know I should find books on the principles but to save time !!!
The paddles especially baffle me as to their reason for living. Most other stuff I can get my head around but there are these blank bits.
I'm sure Finless must have done something for the "complete idiot" but where is it?
Thanks. :arggg:

[broke-again]

Check this out http://travel.howstuffworks.com/helicopter3.htm theres lot of information on the net about helis.

The paddles especially baffle me as to their reason for living

Look at them as power steering for the heli... :D

Hope this helps.

[vera]

Hello jingles. I like the label broke-again gave it, "power steering", and that's what the flybar provides. Notice that tilting the flybar changes the rotor blade pitch. There is a lot of leverage on the flybar to do that.

The plane of rotation of the flybar tries to match the the swashplate. Put your heli on the coffee table and turn on the radio and step it through this action. Put the flybar crossways, left/right, main rotor nose/tail. Move the cyclic stick forward and notice that the left paddle pitch goes down, while the right paddle pitch goes up. This would like to tilt the flybar left, but thanks to gyroscopic precession the force is translated 90 degrees around the circle, and so the flybar tips down in front instead; matching the swashplate. Now position the flybar nose/tail. The main blades are now left/right. Pull the flybar down in front - which is what it will want to do - and notice that the pitch on the left main blade goes down and the pitch on the right main blade goes up. This would like to tip the heli left, but again, thanks to gyroscopic precession this force is acted on 90 degrees later, so the nose goes down; which is what should happen with forward cyclic stick.

We don't have to have a flybar of course, and some scale models don't have one. Full size helis have a hydraulic system but in the RC jobs all we could do is use a stronger servo. The flybar paddles don't do any lifting of the heli so it's pretty easy to tilt the flybar plane of rotation. It's prettly light and so it's pretty quick. And its gyroscopic stability and levering arm give it a lot of authority over the main rotor pitch angle.

[spork]

The flybar on a model is primarily there to add stability in pitch and roll. We use an electronic gyro on the yaw axis. The flybar is basically a mechanical gyro on the other two axes. When people remove flybars from their models, they add electronic stability systems (i.e. gyros) to compensate.

The reason you don't see them commonly on full-scale helis is that the dynamics of our models are so much faster due to their small size.

[BarracudaHockey]

Power steering AND gyroscopic stability.

[Pinecone]

And some full scale do have them. Sometimes with paddles and sometimes with just weights.