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132 3270
132 3271
132 3272
132 3273
Getting started When I remembered I wanted to take pictures of the construction, this is far as I was already.
132 3274
Side view
132 3275
The swash plate This little device is freaky. In a nutshell, the pitch of the blades varies through their rotation, according to the motions of the aileron/elevator servos (called cyclic on a helicopter) and the collective pitch. It's all a bit mad and I onyl slightly understand it so far.
132 3276
The engine OS 32 helicopter engine. Here it is with the Raptor cooling fan attached, basically a centrifugal fan.
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Engine, closeup
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Engine, other side
132 3279
Engine in the frame
132 3280
Engine in the frame, closeup
132 3281
Engine in the frame, other side
132 3282
The engine The slot-shaped hole you can see is where the exhaust (muffler) pipe will attach, when it arrives.
132 3283
Assembling the rotor head These bits will eventually sit atop the swash plate.
132 3285
Rotor head bearings At this point, I only assembled one end of this piece. The bearing set in the bag fit onto the shaft with a collection of washers, spacers, bolts, loctite and so on. It's all a bit busy. Particularly sicne I forgot to put in a supporting piece rigth in the centre to had to disassemble the thing.
132 3286
Look at the mess!
132 3287
Rotor head and flybar The fly bar, I think, ,ostly balances the main blades. They are on a single bar whose pitch alters with the cyclic, but not the collective (I think, lots of "I think"'s here!). The bar is supposed to be near-perfectly balanced otherwise it causes really nasty vibrations in the rest of the machine. Rememeber, this thing is a huge spinning top, really.
132 3288
Flybar again
132 3290
Tail rotor assembly This was a fiddly piece to put together.
132 3291
Tail rotor assembly The red coloured pulley is a two-piece item, a flange fits on one end, and it can go two ways round. The correct way si with the shorter end into the pulley, longer end outwards. Otherwise, as I discovered, there is about 2 to 3mm play in the tail rotor shaft. Not good.
132 3292
Coming together nicely now Tail piece is in, various tail-plane bits and bobs. The tail rotor blades are on the wrong way round here (and remained so for a while) until I realised I had the belt on the wrong way. I noticied this long before firing up the engine, thankfully.
132 3294
Tail rotor The orange material you can see through the hole is the belt. The blades twist together, in opposite directions. This is how you point the helicopter.
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Main drive wheel The belt goes back to the tail rotor. The grey spindle meshes with a drive wheel on the engine drive shaft. There is a shaft going up through these two wheels directly to the rotor hub.
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Beastie so far
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Clutch The silver drum in the centre of the picture is the clutch bell. Inside this is a clutch disc, which runs directly from the engine below it. It's designed to be fully diengaged below about 7000rpm and fully engaged above 10000rpm. The rotor blades operate at a fraction of this speed, not normalyl going faster than about 1700 rpm.
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Gyro This is described by many as the "most cost effective" stabilisation gyro on the market at present. It's job: keep the machine pointing in the direction you want it to. In the old days, you would program a "revolution mix" into your radio which altered the tail rotor blade pitch according to what you were doing with the throttle/collective, the idea being that you could match the rotational energy being put out by the main rotors to make the tail rotor counteract it, and keep the machine steady. Technology these days simply measures the rotation and does what it needs to counteract it. Funky. This is what makes the difference between whirly-top-with-dangerous-bits and simply "dangerous".
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Digital servo The Gyro came with this servo. Because the tail rotor pitch is being computer controlled, and you want it to react fast, you have to use a fast servo. Better yet, you use a digital servo, which mostly means the servo PWM's the motor inside much much faster. This is a reasonably speedy digital servo. When it's going, it whines a bit, but I am pretty sure that's normal.
DSC00098
Tara
DSC00404
IMG 2971
IMG 2972
IMG 2973
IMG 2974
IMG 2978
IMG 2995
IMG 3014
IMG 8144
IMG 8145
IMG 8146
IMG 8148
IMG 8804
IMG 8805
IMG 8806
The back yard
IMG 8807
Tara
IMG 8808
The tree line
IMG 8809
Tara and Trees
IMG 8810
The lot See the green markers? They mark either side of the lot at the street. The picture is taken from what I think is the buffer-zone boundary.
IMG 8811
The lot #2 Taken from on top of a mound of earth, just next to the previous image. The lot is between the green markers.
IMG 8812
Tara and the lot The entire lot is in this image. You can see one of the green markers on the left, which also indicates where the road will be. The other marker is just off to the right.
IMG 8813
IMG 8814
IMG 8815
IMG 8816
IMG 8817
Mathematical Bridge
Piper vs. Apollo