alvincfi Senior Heliman Location: Minnesota
| Man what a weekend. I finally decided to get my evo going after it had sat ignored in the corner for the past year. I had this weekend free and worked on it feverishly to fly this last Sunday. Well I must have stayed up too late working on it Saturday night because I had forgotten to put the servo arm bolt in for the tail rotor. Well as I was test flying it in my driveway the tail gave way and started pirouetting uncontollably and I put it down on the concrete a little hard (read: damn hard) breaking the landing gear and a part of the main frame. Of course it also scraped up the BRAND NEW carbon blades and carbon tailblades!! Needless to say I was pretty PO'd. But, I was now on a mission to get her in the air. I had made plans to fly this particular day for the past week and probably wouldn't have a free weekend for a while. I wasn't going to let this "minor mishap' get in the way. Soooo, I ran back to the 'man cave' and started putting her back together. I found some old align fiberglass blades, some very old thunder tiger black paddles, a set of plastic tail blades, I think from a raptor 60. Luckily I had a spare landing gear set. I found some Kwik JB weld and some carbon fiber strips and glued the frame back together in record time. Got everything balanced etc,etc. I finally got out to the field and decided to get her started to do some flight testing. Not! I ran her up and noticed the tail rotor control was backwards!!!! checked the direction, nope, it was ok, checked the gyro, nope it was correcting fine. Well I shut it down to check what the hell was wrong now and discovered that I had put the tail belt on incorrectly and the tail rotor was actually spinning backwards!!! I had taken the tail off to dynamically balance the tailblades during the first crash and put belt on wrong. Anyway I finally and very tenatively got her in the air after all of that. She did fly very smoothly and responsively just like I remembered, just gotta get the better blades etc back on. Just goes to show what happens when you get some "gotta fly-itis" What a weekend!
Lepton | Evo 50 | Freya X-spec |