It is crazy how fast the days go by, and before you know it January is half way over. I am happy that over the past few weeks I have had the chance to go out and fly quite a bit. Even though the weather sucks every time I make it out to the field it is a much needed break from school and normal day to day life. It always amazes me that right when you think you have your whole fleet flying good something seems to go wrong and before you know it, not a single heli you own is flyable.
So last weekend I went to the field and finally got up the courage to try piro flip reversals. I had been practicing them on the sim for a couple weeks. I am the most comfortable flying the 7HV so this is the heli I try most of my new moves on. So about half way through my 5th flight of the day I decide to go for it. As soon I go from full right rudder to full left rudder I heard something strip and the tail never moved to the left, it just stopped. So I hit throttle hold and landed with no damage. Upon inspecting the tail I noticed that my tail pulley gear no longer had any teeth on it. Now I have to say this is the first time I have ever seen this. The belt was not damaged at all but my rear tail pulley was perfectly smooth. At first I had no clue what had caused this but I soon learned that it was most likely the tail blades I was running. I was using the KBDD 112mm tail blades, now the thing about these is they are about twice as heavy as carbon fiber blades. This extra weight puts a lot of extra stress on the tail, especially the pulley during piro reversals. LOL . So in the end, carbon fiber tail blades here I come! This should fix the problem.
You may think that was the end of my bad luck for the weekend, but you couldn’t be more wrong. I go out the next day (Sunday) and was very excited to fly the N5c and get it dialed in with the iKON on it. In the first three flights of the day it was flying nearly perfect and the iKON was 99% tuned. On the fourth flight of the day I was doing some tic tocs when suddenly it sounded like something was catching, like a metal to metal click or something. I immediately hit throttle hold and the motor shut off before the heli even landed. Now at this point I already knew this was not going to be good, don’t ask how I knew this. Upon inspection the motor was completely locked up, and I could not turn it over by hand at all or even get it to budge. So I packed up all my stuff and headed for home. Once I got home and tore the motor out of my heli I quickly tore the backplate off, only to see metal shavings inside. In the end the whole entire motor is junk. The piston has huge gashes in it, which put a gash in the liner. Some how the connecting rod got chipped which put some nice grooves in the case. I am honestly not sure what happened since I was plenty rich on the needles, my only guess is something got sucked in the carb, or something broke in the motor. So if you are reading this and you have an OS55 for sale shoot me an email as I am looking to buy one. LOL
Well there you have it, all of my wonderful adventures in this great hobby. I guess it is true that when it rains it pours. On a positive note I am taking this time to do some serious winter maintenance and cleaning, so that when I do get everything rebuilt they will be in tip top shape.
-Jessie