New member, new night-flier!

[Michael211]

Hi! I just joined up. I've been flying a 400 sized electric for about a year and last month I finally got it all setup with night blades and glowire and started flying after sunset... it's awesome!

My heli is a Falcon 3D 400 sized electric with an outrunner motor and a 2000mah li-po battery pack (well, 3 of them actually so I can get 3 flights in a night). I'm up to being able to perform piro's and figure 8's at night now. Can hover up to about 100ft in the air and keep good perspective, and have successfully survived 2 late night in-flight emergencies.

1st a link controlling 1 of the main blades came off in flight forcing that blade into negative pitch.. managed to put it down safely with no damage (and replaced that link!!!). 2nd, last weekend the pinion came loose from the motor shaft at about 15 ft up and I basically had to auto it in, again with no damage luckily!

I'm hoping that eventually somebody will produce some carbon fiber tailblades for the 400 sized heli's with built in LED's like they do for the 50, 60 and 90 sized helis! I'm not too impressed with the plastic glow-in-the-dark tailblades I've seen for smaller heli's. Just not the same as LED light sources.

Perhaps later this summer I'll put together a 60 sized night-flyer....

Anyways here're 2 pretty good pics I took of it on the ground spooled up one night recently... it's difficult to get good photos in the dark though, so these don't really do it justice IMHO.

- Michael

[flyinfool]

Welcome to the dark side.
Nice saves on those 2 occasions.

Due to the small size and light weight requirement I don't think you will see led tail blades that small. Are you using the UV LED with your glow in the dark tail blades?

Ah yes, bigger is better.

[Michael211]

I dunno Jeff... seems kinda bright to me most nights. :YeaBaby:

No I have regular carbon fiber tailblades on this machine. I've only seen pics and videos of the glow-in-dark tailblades.

I'll be redoing the tail on my heli soon... this was my 1st attempt and I ran out of red glowire before I could trace out the vertical fin. I'm going to unwrap it back to the horizontal fin and splice some blue glowire in to trace the horozontal fin, then splice the red back on for the boom again till I get to the vertical fin where I'll again splice some blue on... this way my fins will match my canopy glowire! :thumbup:

For this 400 sized heli I probably won't worry about the tailblades.... as long as I can tell what's tail and what's canopy that's the most important thing. Later this summer I hope to be able to afford a 60 sized nitro heli to convert to night-flying.... then I'll get LED tailblades!

ps. I already fly a 60 sized X-Cell daytime heli and am also in the process of building a 60 sized Century Airwolf scale model (with another set of the X-Cell mechanics). 3 nitro heli's (and my small 400 sized electric for backyard flying) are my goal here ultimately. Only 1 more to go! :roll:

- Michael

[flyinfool]

I do not want anything on the tail to match the canopy, The colors can blend together and cause lose of orientation.

Remember that the longer the wire the less bright it is.

[Michael211]

Uhmmmm.... I dunno, but I want to try it anyhows. My X-Cell 60 has white canopy and white tailfins and it's never caused a problem in the 2 years I've been flying it. And it goes ALOT further away from me than this small electric heli does.

I figure it can't hurt to try it anyways. Also it's only going to lengthen the overall wire length by about 5 inches.... the red wire is 5 feet long, adding 5 inches more shouldn't affect it's brightness significantly.

Regards!

- Michael

[HeliDude36]

Hello everyone,

I am not new to helicopters, but I am new to night flying..
I read that anything you can do during the day, you can do at night. After about a 1 minute adjustment period, I found that to be fact. My usual flight of loops, rolls, flips, inverted hovers and other assorted stunts were easy.

I love night flying! I even find it better for orientaion because I can see the full rotor disk,, and differentiate between my Green and Red illuminated Skids.

I bought the Night Blades from ehirobo,,, one blade only holds a charge for 6 min,,,, and they won't replace them, (I have sent several emails,, and they only offered me $15 on my next order) They do fly well though. And and EL wire from E-Bay. I got into it cheap,, and love it.

I wonder if there is any Night Flight crash footage out there??? Mabe I will have to contribute to that one night.

[Michael211]

Crashing is no fun... been there, done that, just recently. My side-to-side cyclic servo locked up at 15 degrees, and before I could figure out why my left stick input was having no effect my little heli slid sideways right into the ground and did the "funky-chicken" dance for me. :arggg:

Both night blades broke, bent the main shaft and tail shaft, and of course I'm down a servo. So my night-wings are clipped for a few weeks till I can order new night-blades (they're like $50 for this 400 sized heli). It could have been much worse, had I been higher than I was. I was hovering about 35 feet away at only 6 feet off the deck when the servo locked up. And I mean it locked up tight as a rock, I can't even move the servo arm by hand using force now!

At least I didn't have a tailboom strike so my tail is good except for the tail shaft which is cheap and easy to replace on this heli. The LED night-blades though are a bit more expensive... :(

Next time, YOU crash ok! LOL! I hate not being able to fly at night right now as that was my only glowire equipped bird. :DOH:

- Michael