Long-term Memory

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 0.3
Time flown: 0h07 (cumulative model timer: 27h10)
Rx battery recharged with: 1665 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 583 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 561 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 148 mAh

Comment:
Same weather as yesterday. I mounted my FlyCamOne2 and wanted to give that a try. Somehow, it managed to record 122 pieces of video instead of the 2 shots I planned. I glued the pieces together, but the result is “jumpy”, the quality is bad, it shakes like hell and is overcompressed, but just in case you still want to watch it: 2m18s, 13.7MB (x264 video, ogg-vorbis audio, matroska container, VLC plays this just fine).

After 2 minutes of flight, I suddenly hear a loud “tack”, but didn’t see or feel anything strange. I landed the heli promptly anyway to do a full check. The sound was fairly loud, since the heli was at least 100m away and was clearly audible. I checked the main and tail-drive gears, but none of them showed any damage. The rotor looked OK as well, until I examined it a bit closer:

The plastic foil at the top-tip of the blade somehow got loose and teared. This tip was traveling at around 430km/h (67cm from the axis, rotating at 1700rpm), which makes a lot of noise when something hits this wind.

Just swapping the blades with the spare (wooden) blades had my bird ready to fly again.

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 3
Time flown: 0h51 (cumulative model timer: 27h03)
Rx battery recharged with: not recharged
Tx battery recharged with: not recharged
Glow heater battery recharged with: not recharged
Starter battery recharged with: not recharge

Comment:
A cold but sunny day with some wind.

I just flew around, trying to make normal turns (instead of stall turns). I also worked on my autorotation skills: did some (8 or so) auto’s from 1m height; did some side-in and nose-in landings; tried an “airplane-approach” to learn to keep forward speed during descend.

And I emptied my 5th bottle (3.8l each) of fuel!

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 2
Time flown: 0h28+0h18 (cumulative model timer: 26h12)
Rx battery recharged with: -2440 (discharged at 0.66A) + 3523 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 471 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 552 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 145 mAh

Comment:
Finally we got a nice summer-day, although it was fairly windy.

After my adventure from yesterday, I decided that I should practice auto-rotations: I’ll need them anyway.

Started off by doing a nose-in, left and right landing. Also tried a high-altitude throttle-hold to get a feeling of the switch. There is still a long way to go, but it’s a start.

Giving my Rx battery a full cycle, hopefully this helps to get it charged.

The 0h18 Tx time is for the spectral analysis.

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 3
Time flown: 0h49 (cumulative model timer: 25h26)
Rx battery recharged with: 151+204+153+403+ mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 749 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with:
Starter battery recharged with:

Comment:
A nice after-work flying session with very little wind.

Practiced some more figure-8’s which start looking like real 8’s now. Did my first nose-in landing; it was just as bad as my first tail-in landing…

The last flight ended by a forced auto-rotation: the fuel-line got disconnected from the engine lock with the obvious result. Luckily, this happened at the end of the flight when I was hovering at .5m. I noticed that the fuel-line was vibrating heavily. By the time I realized that I should check it out, the engine quited…

Also, there seems to be a problem charging the Rx battery…

As mentioned before, the cooling fan of my engine needed some attention:

Continue reading ‘Flight log 2008-08-24 – Follow up’ »

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 0.5
Time flown: 0h17 (cumulative model timer: 24h37)
Rx battery recharged with:
Tx battery recharged with:
Glow heater battery recharged with:
Starter battery recharged with:

Comment:
Windy day at the field with dark rainclouds at the horizon. I took my chances anyway and practiced flying in windy conditions.

While preparing for the second flight, somehow the cooling-fan came loose (again)…

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 2
Time flown: 1h01 (cumulative model timer: 24h20) (including a lot of setup-time for the governor)
Rx battery recharged with: 268+1472 mAh (same behavior as some weeks ago)
Tx battery recharged with: 554 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 439 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 141 mAh

Comment:
I just bought myself a governor and needed to test it out. Besides that, a fairly calm day at the field. Besides testing out the governor, I continued to exercise my figure-8’s and nose-in hoover. After the last flight, I noticed that the rotor wasn’t rotating as freely as it used to.

When investigating this at home, the tail rotor made a slight rubbing sound:

The locking pin to keep the tail rotor shaft in place came out of its place. Pushing it back and re-tightening the set screw solved this problem.

Also, I basically undid the tracking adjustment: “black” was too high, so I decreased its pitch by 1 turn.

The governor

A governor is a device that stabilizes the rotor speed using a feedback mechanism. The Futaba GV-1 uses a Hall sensor to detect the magnets attached to the engine-fan. Here is the report about the device itself, its installation and the first test results.

From the 2 flights I did with the governor, I’m fairly happy with it. It does what I want it to do: govern the throttle to keep constant RPM. I must admit that I don’t (yet) do very demanding maneuvers…

Continue reading ‘Flight log 2008-08-15 – Governor’ »

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 2
Time flown: 0h34 (cumulative model timer: 23h19)
Rx battery recharged with: 824 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 576 mAh (did 0h51 of sim as well; sim cumulative timer: 15h25+0h36)
Glow heater battery recharged with: 304 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 55 mAh

Comment:
A windy but nice day at the field, although the sun was low and annoying.

Practiced small figure-8’s (20m total width) and hoovering in different orientations. I’m able to keep the heli steady for quite some time in nose in (i.e. around 1 minute).

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 1
Time flown: 0h17 (cumulative model timer: 22h45)
Rx battery recharged with:
Tx battery recharged with:
Glow heater battery recharged with:
Starter battery recharged with:

Comment:
Another very windy day at the field. Practiced some stall-turns in windy conditions and nose-in hoovering.

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 0.5 + 1.5
Time flown: 0h59 (cumulative model timer: 22h28)
Rx battery recharged with: 787 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 475 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 275 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 55 mAh

Comment:
Mainly a short flight to check the new balance tape and correct the tracking: the “black” blade needed 1 turn more pitch (which roughly gave it +1° compared to the other blade). After that some basic flying around with stall turns. Did some adjustments on the throttle-curve to keep the rpm up when braking with some negative pitch.

Continue reading ‘Flight log 2008-07-26’ »