It has been a busy couple of days for the little bird. A big box of spares arrived this week, and along with those spares came a new mini DVR for on-board footage, and an upgraded motor.
In the upper left is a full CNC allow sport rotor assembly.
On it’s right is a new CNC allow tail rotor case and grips.
Far right in the photo are three sets of main shafts. It’s important that the main shaft be as true as possible.
Below the sport head are two different styles of flybar paddles. EIX factory paddles and TRex clone paddles.
Just to the right of those are two pairs of tail rotor blades.
The four allow bits just above the blades and paddles are new main bearings and carriers. The main bearings in the kit are housed in plastic. They are also the source of my head wobble issues, that I recently solved.
Heading right again are variety of pinions, 11T, 12T and 13T. These are important to establishing the proper head speed for a given gearset, motor and battery combination.
The large blue blob near the center is the new motor (another photo of that follows).
Right of the motor is a full spare plastic TRex factory head and grip set.
Below those are a set of Version 1 feathering shafts, and 2 sets of V2 shafts.
You can see the physical size of the two motors differs quite a bit. The new one also has a built in air circulation van on the base of the body. After flying 3 packs I found that it was cool to the touch. Big change from the Alpha 400 (on the left) that it replaced. This new one includes an addition set of windings, and a higher power output.
One little caveat I did not know about the original Alpha400 motor, was that it’s spindle shaft is more in line with an aircraft (3.0mm) and not a 450-class helicopter (3.17mm). The new pinions I have actually fit the new motor properly. I think this will help with some of the odd modulation in the flybar and cyclic harmonic it’s been suffering from since I put it together.
New parts are all well and good, but new toys are even better. This one is a light (18grams) self-contained mini DVR (digital video recorder). It will record up to 2 hours of video on a 4GB micro-SD card. This thing is pretty tiny.
It does have one drawback though, the form factor is a major pain the butt to afix to a helicopter, or an airplane for that matter. The normal location of the CCD is on the ‘back’ (or front, you decide) of the case. What would have been nice is if the CCD was at the ‘top’ or, if lying flat, on its’ front.
So, I cut the case on a spare, tilted the CCD forward and secured it with the same type of foam taped used at the factor to secure it in the position I didn’t link.
It’s mounted inside the bottom of the main canopy. There was a blister already in the canopy that appeared to be perfectly suited to this installation. I simply had to cut an opening at the front of the canopy, use some hook-and-loop tape on the bottom and it was a go.
Here is a video clip I shot today, with the camera mounted in that position: