Tail blade grip screw broke in air

[crabfu]

Was just flying around in the garage, and snap.... saw something shoot off, so throttle hold and was able to land it without further damage. Luckily it didn't take my eye out or anything, took me forever to find the piece in the garage, bounced off the walls and into a bunch of junk laying around.

I figured the screw just worked its way back out, not thread locked or something. But... turns out the screw broke in half. Sorry for the blurry pics, but the screw sheared in half in there.

Thought I'd share my exciting evening... I can't say that it surprises me, it is a tiny screw, and I can't imagine what rpms are running through the tail.

-Crabfu

[surgicalCFe]

Holy crap! Thats probably a 1 in a million occurrence. Thats awesome that you didn't crash because of it and that the little piece didn't hit you in the eye or something.

[Buzzkill]

Was just flying around in the garage, and snap.... saw something shoot off, so throttle hold and was able to land it without further damage. Luckily it didn't take my eye out or anything, took me forever to find the piece in the garage, bounced off the walls and into a bunch of junk laying around.

I figured the screw just worked its way back out, not thread locked or something. But... turns out the screw broke in half. Sorry for the blurry pics, but the screw sheared in half in there.

Thought I'd share my exciting evening... I can't say that it surprises me, it is a tiny screw, and I can't imagine what rpms are running through the tail.

-Crabfu


Hey man, I'm not trying to steal the thread but I had the same thing only in the main grips. Didn't crash, the grip litteraly fell while I was working on it!

What size is that screw?

[crabfu]

Yeah it was lucky... or unlucky depending on how you look at it :) I'm not sure the screw size, but it's tiny, like the size of the ones for the ball links

-Crabfu

[trexflyer02]

The screw size is 2mm x 10mm. The same thing happened to me when I was building my Gaui; the stock screw broke in half. I replaced those (spindle) screws and the blade grip screws with beefier Du-Bro 1.5mm allen-head screws before the first flight. These (http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXE013&P=SM) were the screws I used.

[mjr_larkin]

The screw size is 2mm x 10mm. The same thing happened to me when I was building my Gaui; the stock screw broke in half. I replaced those (spindle) screws and the blade grip screws with beefier Du-Bro 1.5mm allen-head screws before the first flight. These (http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXE013&P=SM) were the screws I used.
You use those both for the main blade and rotor blade grips?

[trexflyer02]

Yes, they are both the same size.

[crabfu]

ok, so the broken screw is the same as the ball link ones, just a tad shorter. Here is a pic of the main spindle compared to the tail spindle

-Crabfu