Near disaster

[Buzzkill]

I was messing around with my belt drive 200 this morning after a few post by OICU812 in another thread trying to tweak my 401/3154 tail setup to get rid of the 2-3" kick-out during collective punches. I did a 3 min. vid and posted it doing as hard of punch-outs as I could in my living room.

I flew a couple more packs during my tweaking and couldn't get rid of it. A hour or two later I took it outside to test my latest adjustments. Got it in the air, flew for a couple minutes then set it down to adjust the gain. Spooled back up and instantly it was spinning CCW. I hit throttle hold and inspected the tail.

Three of the six screws holding the side-plates together were missing and the pitch lever was off the slider ball link. Don't ask me how I landed the thing to start with because I don't know how it even flew.

Apparently during my recent two rebuilds that involved MicroHeli tails, I forgot to lock-tite one of them :arggg: I usually assemble the parts then do each screw/bolt one at a time with lock-tite.

Well a couple minutes later all is well. Now I just have to let this cure and get back to testing. Lucky me :thumbup:

[GeneP]

Close call, Buzz. Reminds me of the heli pilots saying that once you lift off it is all emergency proceedures after that...

I still don't know how I managed to get my sweet thang back on the ground after the tail twisted 45 degrees on a hard punch of the left lever. I guess it was just my expert flying ability...:rolling:shock:

[psindrup]

Had almost the same thing happen to me. Remember this?:

http://www.helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=73099

How about Locitite? Should we use read on those little screws?

Peter

[Buzzkill]

I use the green. I just forgot to use it.

[small.planes]

Ive been using 222 (purple) as the a) the screws are tiny, and b) its the only one I can find... (need to tidy up some more)
at the low torques on these screws I think pretty much any one will do.

Dave