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Engine in the frame
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Engine in the frame, closeup
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Engine in the frame, other side
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The engine The slot-shaped hole you can see is where the exhaust (muffler) pipe will attach, when it arrives.
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Assembling the rotor head These bits will eventually sit atop the swash plate.
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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.
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Look at the mess!
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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.
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Flybar again
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Tail rotor assembly This was a fiddly piece to put together.
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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.
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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.
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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.