HB V2 power loss

[gboxwood]

Good morning gents,

it's my first post here but I'll introduce myself in the appropriate forum section. I started flying RC helis in the past month and I stepped in with an HB V2.

I've been flying it for almost 7 hours now and I upgraded it one step at the time.

Lately I'm having a problem with the flight duration. I keep logs of each flight in this first phases and of battery cycles as well: the electric world is pretty new to me.

I've been flying with the the direct drive tail rotor, the X380 motor, the Xtreme all CNC rotor head and the Xtreme wooden blades, both the 8 and the 10 degrees. I like the latter the most.

I also rotate between 3 batteries, all 1300 mAh, 25C. I charge them with a Team Orion charger though a balancing board.

I always fly with a Li-po saver so I know when to stop.

Flight times with this setup are around 15-16 minutes depending on the flight profile. Lately however, I'm starting to feel a disturbing loss of power which is apparently not related to battery voltage: the loss is so noticeable that I have to increase the throttle up to 100% and then the HB would drop anyway. It starts at about 8 minutes through the flight.

I went through the mechanics to check, I tested the batteries to see if I mistreated them somehow. I haven't had any critical crashes so far.

I'm not really sure what is happening, do you guys have any hint about this?

Thank you very much!

[gboxwood]

I have something more to add.

I've been flying today to check a few things. Apparently it is all about the motor becoming extremely hot and loosing power to the extent that full throttle is no longer enough to keep the heli airborne.

I let it cool down and then performance was good again.

The performance loss happens after 3-4 minutes of continuous flight.

At the beginning and for the next 4 hours I could fly 15 minutes straight, now it is impossible.

Canopy or no canopy doesn't make a noticeable difference: I now opened a big hole in the canopy for the motor to vent better.

Is there anything I'm missing here about motor maintenance? Should I replace anything on the motor after a certain amount of flight hours? It didn't run this hot before... it has nothing to do with outside air temp, yesterday it was pretty cold, about 10-15° C.

Thank you,

Giacomo

[gboxwood]

Ok, yesterday I was able to sort the problem out and it is indeed the 380X motor. I switched back to the original motor and it worked just fine as I was used to.

I'm now again in the 16 minutes flight times with the wooden 10 degrees blades.

I don't know what went wrong with the 380X and I don't care right now.

If you have any clue please let me know.

Thank you,

Giacomo