seattle_helo
Key Veteran
Location: Seattle, WA USA
My Posts This: Topic Forum | Alright, Wayne, fetch my wheelbarrow, please!  I really do appreciate all of the kind words. Thanks guys. Joe, your comment was a bit harsh. You'll see the pink soon enough at IRCHA. 
Totto, thanks again for all of your help with the light. I had to do some modifications to the frame to allow it to fit into the pod but it turned out nice in the end. Nothing a little metal work couldn't take care of!
kennethw, my answers to your direct questions:
1) I do not have any tail problems with this heli. In general, size does matter. In your case if you could fit longer tail blades I do think it would help increase the tail authority all else being equal.
2) My opinion is that the direction of TR rotation does not matter. Just looking at full size aircraft alone you will notice that many of them have both clockwise and counterclockwise rotations on either side of the tail boom on a given machine. On our models, I have two Trex450's with identical five blade heads. To make one more scale I switched the tail gearbox around to the other side of the boom and changed the TR rotation to clockwise. As a practical matter I notice no difference between the tail authority of either machine- one with the stock tail and the one I switched.
3) I don't know what the efficiency differences are between a cascade TR and non-cascade TR. But it seems some guys on the forum (Super Hornet for one) have had very nice success with a cascade TR so it must be able to work very well.
When I first changed a 450 to a five blade head I had tail issues as well. The control was marginal and in a steep climbout it would blow the tail out every time. Super Hornet mentioned that speeding the tail up with the old, original Align 450 gears would help that and so that's what I did. He was right and the machines fly great now with the higher TR RPM. It's tricky to find those original Align parts anymore but apparently you can also use other aftermarket gears to achieve the same thing. There was a thread or two around here just recently that addressed this. See if you can't find that for more info. Are you certain your TR is set up properly? If so, maybe a combo of more RPM and the four blades will do it for you.
nick |
