Belt tension?

[psindrup]

After my minor mishap with my tial (see other post) I have had to retension my tail belt, but I think it is very difficult to judge how tight is tight enough and how tight is too tight.

Any suggestions and/or guidelines would be highly appreciated.

Peter

[Gr4yb3ard]

Most manuals suggest that moderate (I'd think 2lbs or so, oh, crud, 1kg!!!) of finger pressure should move the belt from it's position, into contact with the other side, just aft of the forward pinion.

This seems to take about 3kg of rearward pull on the tailboom.

If you get belt chatter (noise) it's too loose. If she spools down quick, you might want to try loosening things.

Actually, this heli does not seem to picky about the tension, but I've heard of folks with loose belts, and seen a vid, where I'd swear the tension was way to tight.

Hope this helps, Pete

***yb3ard

[Buzzkill]

There's been discussions about belt tension for many many moons with every belt heli. There's not a way to "measure" the tension that I'm aware of. I remember a thread were a member mentioned that the pros. just give it a pull i.e. set it by feel. That's what I do. I'm certainly not a pro but I set mine by "feel" trying to get enough where it won't slip but loose enough where it will slip in a tail blade strike.

[crabfu]

I found that having it pretty loose works fine... "pretty loose" yeah, subjective. What I usually do, is rotate the tail by hand, and if it is too loose, it will slip and you'll hear a click. I found that if you do it by hand, and just get it to a point where you don't hear a click anymore, then that's tight enough, it won't slip even if it seems "pretty loose" :)

-Crabfu