Long-term Memory

I’m selling my Thunder Tiger Raptor 50 Titan:

This is a great helicopter for beginners. Its setup is very gentle and it can take some gusty winds. The governor allows you to concentrate on flying before having to fine-tune the engine. It’s also fast to refuel (in contrast with recharging a LiPo battery).

I’m selling it because my new club does not allow nitro.

I’m selling, preferably as a whole:

• The helicopter itself, including manual
• All servos (3x Futaba 3152, 1x 9206, 1x 9254)
• OS 50SX-H Hyper motor (incl manual)
• Gy401 tail gyro (incl manual)
• GV-1 governor (incl manual)
• Rx battery 3600mAh 4.8V, not new but still usable
• battery-monitor: shows the charge-state of the Rx battery
• NO receiver
• fuelpump
• Starter engine & pin
• 4 liters of fuel
• glow heater

In summary: everything you need to fly expect the transmitter, the receiver & a battery charger

I prefer you come and pick it up near Brussels, Belgium; that way I can show you it still flies.

If you are interested, feel free to propose a price.

After way to long, I finally found some time/weather combination to fly again. I’m a little embarrassed it took so long…

Of course, all my batteries were fairly dead. The glow heater was completely gone (0V), but was still usable after charging. My starter-battery was dead beyond repair. The LiPo’s of the miniTitan were is fairly good shape after more than a year in the fridge: 3/4th charged.

Before the flights, I upgrade my CastleLink software to version 3.40.0, and upgraded the ESC firmware to 3.27 along with these (PDF) new settings.
Continue reading ‘Flight log 2011-10-15’ »

Place: Roeselare
Tanks flown: 0.1
Time flown: 0h15 (cumulative model timer: 32h22)
Rx battery recharged with: 885 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 273 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 825 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 132 mAh

Comments:
Looking for, buying and rennovating a house appears to have a remarkable ability to consume every bit of spare time I had. I finally found some time to wake my bird from hibernation.

I topped the batteries to compensate their self-discharge during the last 10 months. I wasn’t expecting my nitro-engine to start smoothly, but it worked perfectly.
I only hoovered a bit around to regain my muscle memory.

Place: Halle

Raptor
Tanks flown: 1
Time flown: 0h18 (cumulative model timer: 32h07)
Rx battery recharged with: 428+197 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 548 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 1246 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 450-ish mAh (forgot to note down)

miniTitan
Flights: 0.5
Time flown: 0h06 (cumulative model timer: 3h23)
Heli battery recharged with: (2) balanced 2181 mAh;
Tx battery recharged with: see above

Comments:
Went flying after dinner, the wind had calmed down and the rain had stopped.

I had some trouble starting my Raptor (glow heater indicated only 1A instead of the usual 5A). Since it’s been a while since I charged it, the battery was dead. A few minutes at the charger solved the problem.

In the mean time, I took my miniTitan out. Did some flying back and forth and a few stall turns to regain confidence. Next I did some back-flips. This is where it went wrong. On my 3rd back-flip, I intended to keep the heli inverted for a second and continue the back-flip, but the ground intervened…

Continue reading ‘Flight log – 2009-07-25’ »

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 2
Time flown: 0h30 (cumulative model timer: 31h49)
Rx battery recharged with: 1244 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 491 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 1397 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 54 mAh

Comments:
A very windy but beautiful day. Did some basic flying around (stall turn, circuit). Also retried flying inverted for several seconds with success.

Added 1 turn of pitch to the “black” blade to adjust the tracking

Place: Halle

Raptor
Tanks flown: 2
Time flown: 0h27 (cumulative model timer: 31h19)
Rx battery recharged with: mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 559 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 1300 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 1250 mAh

miniTitan
Flights: 2
Time flown: 0h21 (cumulative model timer: 3h17)
Heli battery recharged with: (1) balanced 1934 mAh; (2) balanced 2137 mAh;
Tx battery recharged with: see above

Comments:
Went flying after work. It was fairly windy, but the wind was fairly constant. I practiced the maneuvers I’ve been doing in the sim lately: autorotation and inverted flight, both successful!

Inverted flight worked out fairly well. I started by doing backflips. Next I stopped halfway through the backflip and tried to keep it stable. I only need to work on my reflexes to get me out of inverted trouble. Obviously pushing the throttle/pitch up is not the best idea… Luckily I had (just) enough height to correct my peculiar situation.

The miniTitan held up fairly well in the winds, although I was more busy fighting the wind than flying. I increased the CCMP-mixing from 50% to 75% on the elevator and ailerons. Now it is more vivid, just like my raptor. I tried some backflips as well, but the wind made this a challange.

Continue reading ‘Flight log – 2009-04-23’ »

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 2
Time flown: 1h00 (cumulative model timer: 30h52)
Rx battery recharged with: 272+392+overnight trickle mAh (again)
Tx battery recharged with: 489+overnight trickle mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 1473 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 498 mAh

Comment:
Before this flight, I adjusted the pitch and throttle curves and activated the IdleUp2 position. This is the updated table from before:

Today was the first day with reasonable weather. It was still windy, but almost no gusts.

Had some trouble starting the engine. Turns out there was some dirt in the needle of the carburator. Simply turning the needle a bit (5 ticks) open, starting the engine and returning the needle to its original position solved this issue (although it took me more than 30 minutes to figure it out).

No spectacular flight for this first time, just some hoovering in different directions. The second flight was a bit more entertaining: I rehearsed my stall-turns and tried some standard patterns, which was quite a challenge in these (cross)wind conditions.

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 3
Time flown: 0h56 (cumulative model timer: 29h52)
Rx battery recharged with: 728 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: not recharged
Glow heater battery recharged with: 462 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 133 mAh

Comment:
Another beautiful autumn day (which are fairly rare in Belgium), although the sun was hanging low. Naturally, I was able to pilot my heli straight into the sun. Apart from the black spot in my vision the next 3 minutes, nothing got damaged in the process.

Tried and succeeded in a full auto-rotation with 0% engine power (previous attempts where with some power). Turns out that it isn’t too much different from 15%. Even at 15%, the engine is hardly engaging the clutch so it barely provides power.

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 4
Time flown: 1h00 (cumulative model timer: 28h56)
Rx battery recharged with: 1373 mAh (but more than 2 hours after the last flight)
Tx battery recharged with: 459 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 193 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 30 mAh

Comment:
Another beautiful day at the field, although the wind was gusty.

Practiced autorotations a lot. I’m mostly following this guide: try to land with less and less power available. I started out at 30%. The last attempt was at 15% power.

I’m a bit surprised how rough you can land the Raptor 50. Just make sure that you don’t have sideways or backward motion, as it might tip over or bend the tail boom.

Continue reading ‘Flight log 2008-09-28’ »

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 3
Time flown: 0h46 (cumulative model timer: 27h56)
Rx battery recharged with: 221+800 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 470 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 430 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 115 mAh

Comment:
Very nice weather: around 20°C and blue skies. Hardly any wind at first, but it got stronger during the afternoon.

First flight was mostly tuning the new rotorblades to get them to track correctly. I adjusted a total of 3 turns to get it to an acceptable level. The black blade still is a bit low, but probably only 0.5 turn or so.

The Rx battery had the same problem as before. I’m guessing it is still warm from the flight. I’ll try to recharge it later.

Other flight where mainly to get some footage from my FlyCamOne2. There is still a big “wobble” all over the screen caused by the vibration, but it’s a lot better than the previous attempt.

Continue reading ‘Flight log 2008-09-27’ »