kyoshall
New Heliman
Location: Auckland. New Zealand
| Should be easy to convince the other half you need one of these...
They come in a nice pink box 
Inside the box is many bags of parts in the Kyosho tradition.
Two parts are assembled. The blade grips are bolted to the head and
the one way bearing is installed in the hub. The last helicopter I
built from this level was a Concept 60 and the mast was assembled
with those.
The servo frame is the same as the 5 and 5M, but because it has
the EMS kit the aileron and elevator servos are locked off.
Assembly starts with attaching the servo frame and the EMS locks
on the aileron and elevator. Install the bearings for the mast
and counter shaft. Install the main gear and mast, then
assemble and install the drive pulley, tail drive pulley and
counter shaft.
Assembling the mast, head, and flybar takes a while because there
are a lot of linkages to make up and it pays to take the time
to make sure the flybar balances up well.
To get it to this stage, which is pretty much the same as what is
already assembled on a Caliber 5, 5M took about 4 hours.
The mast and head are the same as the Caliber 5.
Add the skids and for those flying nitro install the tank, engine
and muffler. In my case I slipped in the electric motor assembly
complete with ESC and battery eliminator and fitted the main belt.
It was then time to tackle the tail assembly which is very different
to any of the other Kyoshos. There are 14 bearings to install, but
it all goes together very nicely, and I like that there are ball
links at both ends of the tail control rods. I was not particularly
impressed with the use of cable ties to hold the control rod guides
and even less with the white ones supplied so I found some black ones
to use so they were less obvious.
Setting up the servo linkages was straight forward and in most cases
the manual gives the correct lengths. I always setup a new helicopter
using default transmitter settings and checked the pitch range this way.
I didn't have symmetrical pitch settings but that was easily fixed
by adjusting the main blade pitch links. The overall length ended up
being 35.5mm to give a pitch range of +- 10 degrees. Hmmm should be
good for the 3d fliers.
At this stage I decided it was time to fire it up on a stand and
check it out, bring the blades into track and set the rotor rpm's
for the flight conditions. I like a lazy helicopter in Normal so I
set that a little over 1400rpm, with 1550rpm on Idleup1 and 1700rpm
on Idleup2. Set the exponentials to -40 on Normal and -30 on the
Idle ups for aileron, elevator, and rudder and set the delays for
flight condition changes the same as I had used on Caliber 5's.
Time for a flight... without any drama at all it lifted off into
a very smooth hover and a little trimming improved it even more.
Flight mode transitions proved to be even smoother than I had with
the 5's. I get torque changes on the 5's which affect the tail on
change. This could the push pull on the tail or setup. I am not sure.
After 3 batteries trimming out and setting up in the hover I am
looking forward to getting into forward flight. It is certainly
a very different helicopter to the Caliber 5 to fly considering
the number of parts that are same and am absolute pleasure to fly
so far.
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