CRASH!!!

I guess I got a little ahead of myself and had my first crash yesterday. I got to where I could hover out a battery over the weekend so I decided to start working on some side in hovers. I obviously wasn't quite ready for that. It got away from me a little bit and I probably could have recovered it except that it was coming straight at me. When those spinning blades are coming for your head you kind of loose your concentration. I actually started running as my heli went sideways into the drive way.

I broke the center hub, lost the retaining pin, probably bent the main shaft and I need another set of blades. My wife is not going to be happy about the bill at the hobby shop! Oh well... I'll let you know the grand total after I head over there this afternoon. Until then keep the spinning side up!

Day 3 - Balance the Marble

So, this morning I managed to hover through a whole battery with only 3 "landings"... I'm still practicing in my garage so that means that I'm holding it in about an 8 sq ft cube and avoiding my motorcycle, the little cord that hangs down from the garage door opener, my cabinets and most importantly myself. The big difference in the 3 minute hovers and the 15 to 30 second hovers is that I can now stop unwanted movement and initiate movement in the direction I want, most of the time...

I've read on a lot of forums that hovering a helicopter is like balancing a marble on a sheet of glass. I didn't believe it but it actually turns out to be a very good analogy. Controlling where the heli goes, countering any undesired motion and initiating motion in the direction you want really is very similar to what you would do if you were balancing a ball on a flat surface.

Imagine you have a ball on a sheet of ply wood. The ball starts coming towards you. To stop it you need to tilt the plywood away from you until the motion stops then level it out. Same with a helicopter. If it's moving toward you you actually get it tilted forward until it stops, it will hang there for a second and if things go well you will get it leveled out and stationary again.

Also if you have the same ball sitting still on the sheet of plywood and you want it to move away from you you tilt the plywood away from you and slowly the ball starts to roll away. If you leave the wood tilted the ball will continue to pick up speed unless you level it back out. Again, a helicopter reacts very much the same way. If you tilt the blades away from you it will slowly start to move away and pick up speed until, hopefully, you level it out and bring it to a stop.

So when you are flying if you watch the tilt of the disc made by the rotating blades you can get an idea of which way the heli is going to go and counter it before it happens. I've read several theories on what part of the heli to watch when you are flying, the nose the skids, etc. but for me right now watching the disc seems to work best.

I'm planning to go to the hobby shop today and pick up a second battery so I have more practice time. 10-15 minutes at a time is just not doing it for me. I may ask them about trimming and balancing my heli since it still has a very mild vibration at lower head speeds. I probably won't post anything this weekend but I plan to work on holding the hover steadier and longer. By Monday I should be hovering a whole battery and maybe working on some side in hovers.

Have a good weekend!!!

Day 2 - So much for RADD and a little hover video

Well, I tried to do RADD and I see where he's coming from but now that I've had the heli in the air a little I'm not sure I totally agree with the method. I made it through the first 2 or 3 batteries without taking off and more or less following the RADD method, if not to the letter at least the intent. I spun up and held the tail and actually got pretty comfortable with controlling the rudder. It became more or less instinctive as opposed to the initial attempt where the control seemed backwards (see yesterdays post).

I played with moving the swash as he recommends. This was completely intuitive to me. Move the stick to the right the heli goes right, left - left, etc. So I quickly got bored with this and basically moved onto the last couple batteries of the RADD method where he tells you to just scoot it around the floor. I completely ignored the 1 ft box through the whole thing and instead used about a 5 ft square. When I started getting it close to a wall either in the kitchen or the garage I would go pick it up and put it back in the middle and play around again. Then I hovered. But before I get to that here's what I discovered about the RADD method.

RADD is really good at telling you what to do and making the instructions entertaining. What he's not good at is telling you why you are doing it. Basically he is slowly getting you used to the controls and how the heli will react. It's much better to be familiar with the controls before you are flying. It's also easier to hover if you start off with the model relatively stationary. If it's scooting across the ground at lift off you will have to correct for any movement before you can concentrate on a stationary hover and stopping movement is much harder than keeping it from moving to start with. So he's teaching you to hold it still through spin up with the one foot box.

The problem I have with his method is this... A helicopter has 6 degrees of freedom of motion as shown in the picture to the left. Basically it can move in two ways on each of 3 axis. It can move along the axis or it can rotate around the axis. For example it can move forward and backwards along the X-Axis and it can tilt to the left or right or rotate around the X-Axis. By keeping the helicopter on the floor you remove three of the degrees of freedom. While on the floor it can not rotate around the X or Z axis and, as long as you don't give it too much throttle it can't move laterally through the Y axis. So all you are left with is lateral movement on the X and Z axis and rotation on the Y. This is OK for getting the general feel of the controls but doesn't really go very far towards getting you in control of the heli.

I quickly realized all this when I decided to skip ahead and hover. No I didn't crash but pretty close. I ran the throttle up, came off the ground and immediately heli shot off in I don't even remember which direction. That's when I realized that countering motion in one direction had another effect. It caused the aircraft to roll in the other direction and start moving that way.

While trying to lift off my model has a tendency to go left and forward. In countering that tendency during spin up I add right aileron and up elevator. Once it came off the ground it almost immediately tried to go right and back. Fortunately I had the training gear on and all it really did was hit the right rear ping pong ball.

This is when I modified the RADD method to my liking. Instead of scooting around on the ground I would give it just enough power to come an inch or so off the ground. This way I have all 6 degrees of freedom but the training gear keeps the heli from going too far in any one direction. The only ways that you are not limited are up and rotation of the tail. I put a self imposed limit on lateral movement that if I got within 2 feet of a wall I would spin down and manually move it back to the center of my flying area.

Using this method I got a feel for the impacts of the rotational movement without risk of damage to my new toy. I went through a couple batteries like this and as my confidence built and my control got better I started increasing the altitude a little bit at a time.

So here's what you've been waiting for, some video of a total novice trying to fly an RC Heli!!! This is after two days, about 6 batteries and probably 2 to 3 hours worth of practice. As you can see I don't even bother to change clothes after work before starting to play. I'm certainly not proficient but I'm getting better every time. I've flown a couple more batteries since this video and can now probably maintain a 20+ second hover. The next thing I need to learn is how to correct for lateral movement without over correcting. I'll be working on that tonight. Enjoy the video and no comments on my messy garage!!!

Day 1 - Got the Heli, Repairs and First "Flight"

I got home last night and sitting on my porch was a big blue box with my new heli in it. I brought it in unpacked it and started charging the battery. Unfortunately the kit only comes with a DC charger with alligator clips that you hook to a 12V car battery. So I hooked it up to my Jeep and started the battery charging while I took a look at my new toy. The pic to the left is what I found in the box. The controller seemed more substantial than I expected. The helicopter seemed a little more fragile than I would have hoped.

As the battery charged and I inspected the heli a little closer I discovered that, as I suspected, it

had been crashed. Even though the seller on e-bay described it as "out of balance" and claimed

he had only "hovered it twice". When I got the battery charged and spun it up a little the main shaft was obviously bent, the canopy had a small crack and one of the blades was broken.

None of this would have been a big deal since there were spare blades and a spare main shaft included. The blades came with the kit and apparently the seller had purchased a spare main shaft but had not installed it for some reason. So I set to swapping out the main shaft. This shouldn't have taken long except I had no idea what I was doing. After removing the fly bar, the blades and disassembling the swash I discovered that all I really needed to do was pull a pin and remove the whole head assembly as one piece.

After getting the head off I discovered why the new main shaft hadn't been installed. The bolt in the retaining collar had been striped. After trying to get the bolt out with pliers with no success (these things are about a mm across) I decided to drill the bolt out and buy a new retaining collar. I drilled out the bolt and got the collar off. I ended up having to cut the shaft with a cut off wheel on my dremel to get the bearings off.

With everything disassembled and my "new" helicopter sitting in pieces on the coffee table I headed off to the hobby shop to get a new retaining collar. $44 later I had the $4 collar, an AC charger and a set of tools from e-flite made specifically for these models. I got everything back together, installed the symmetrical blades and once again spun it up. Most of the vibration was gone but the blades were a little out of track. After a little adjusting things were looking pretty good. So finally time to try to fly. At this point it was getting close to 9:00 so I didn't have much time before the wife would start complaining about the noise.

I set the heli in my kitchen on the tile floor and decided to start the RADD method. Battery one: spin up and spin down and hold the tail. OK. This sounds easy enough. Initially the controls seemed backwards. Left rudder made the tail go right, right rudder made the tail go left. Then I realized that I was "flying" the wrong end of the heli. Left rudder made the nose go left and right rudder made the nose go right. OK, it's going to take a while to get used to this, maybe this RADD guy is onto something.

Through the first battery I kept it on the ground. I managed to resist the urge to kick up the throttle and see what would happen. One of the rules of the RADD method is to keep the heli in a 1 ft square and any time it's gets out of the square you have to pick it up, put it back and start over again. When I would spin up the rotors the heli would start to drift to the left and forward so I ended up giving it some right aileron and down elevator to compensate and keep it in the box.

One thing I noticed at this point was the interaction between the controls. When I give it more left rudder I have to compensate with more right aileron to keep it from drifting left. Also I found that it's important to get the gyro initialized properly.

The gyro will attempt to hold the tail in one direction to compensate for the changes in torque when the main rotor speed changes. The main rotor spins in a clockwise direction which makes the heli want to spin in a counter clockwise direction when you add throttel and the reverse when you let off. When the battery is plugged in the gyro initializes for a few seconds. While this is happening it's critical to not move the heli. The first time I tried it I plugged in the battery and immediately moved the heli from the counter to the floor. It was almost impossible to hold the tail through spin up and spin down. Then I remembered reading about gyro initialization. I unplugged the battery and plugged it in again being careful to not move the model.

I started it up again and found that the gyro really did a good job of holding the tail. I only needed to give minimal rudder input to keep it in line. As the battery charge ran down I found that the tail had a tendency to drift to the left requiring more left rudder (remember left rudder makes the tail go right and the nose go left).

I tried to get my wife to take some videos but she wasn't being cooperative and it wasn't really very interesting to watch anyhow. Tomorrow I'll continue and hopefully she will be more accommodating. Stay tuned.

Hello, First Post, First Blog

Hi! I'm John and this is my first blog.

I bought an R/C Helicopter last week and expect it to arrive today. It may even be sitting on my door step as I type. I've spent the last week, since I ordered it, trying to get an idea of what I got myself into. I've found a lot of useful information, tips and suggestions but I haven't found any good documentation of what is involved in getting into this hobby from a newcomers perspective. So.... My plan is to document my little adventure for posterity.

My R/C experience so far involves a 1/10 scale nitro truck that I play with on occasion, an airplane I spent about 2 years building and 10 minutes crashing when I was 15 and being forced to "fly" a plane that a friend of mine was given. That lasted about30 seconds before it crashed. So I don't claim to be an expert or even knowledgeable on the subject. I will probably get technical details wrong. I do promise to do my best to get the facts right and offer a perspective that I hope will be helpful to others.

So let's get started. The heli I decided to start with after reading many reviews, forums and articles is a Blade CP+ from e-flite. From what I've been able to figure out the whole Blade CP line (CP, CP+, and CP Pro) are just different options on the same heli. The CP+ is a collective pitch, 5 channel, LiPo powered model. There are cheaper models out there and of course more expensive but this seemed like a good middle ground for me and I found one that claims to be lightly used on e-bay for a price that was in my very small budget .

All of the forums I've read warn extensively that this, or any of the collective pitch helicopters are not for beginners. So why did I pick this one? Well, there are basically four types of R/C helicopters out there:

1. The 2 channel micros - Air-Hogs, etc. Those things that you find in the mall kiosks or at Wal-Mart. They are really toys. Kids can fly them. Crash them, they don't break. But don't expect them to buzz around you house like you see on TV. These basically offer two controls, main rotor (elevator) and tail rotor(rudder). So you can make it go up and down and spin. There is no forward, backward or side ways control. It goes forward when you give it a little right rudder, assuming you have it balanced right. Basically what you do is fly it in a forward curve to the right then stop, turn back to the left and start another arc to the right. Picture a chain of m's. I have two of these and they are fun for a little while, and the dog loves them but there is really no challenge.

2. Coaxial helicopters - These have two main rotors that rotate in opposite directions to provide more stability. I've never tried these but they claim to be pretty easy to fly. From my reading a lot of people will recommend these as the first step to get into the hobby. They claim that you will learn the controls and perspective, i.e. flying the helicopter with the tail away from you (nose-in in heli speak) where the controls are "reversed". These seemed fairly expensive for just learning perspective so I, like many from what I can tell, decided to skip this step. We'll see how that works out.

3. Fixed Pitch helicopters - Basically the lift of the helicopter is controlled only by the speed of the main rotor. The pitch of the blades does not change or, as the name states, is fixed. I've seen some comments that these are slightly easier to fly than a collective pitch but again I'm not much for baby steps so I jumped over this one too.

4. Collective Pitch (CP) Helicopters - These are the real deal. Collective Pitch means that the pitch of the blades change to increase or decrease lift. These helicopters can fly loops, rolls and hover inverted. Now we're talking!!! These are also the hardest to fly, by all accounts, and the most expensive. So of course this is the way I chose to go for a first heli. As a sub-category of the collective pitch are various sizes and gas/nitro vs. electric.

Most claim that the larger CP helis are easier to learn on and more stable but price being a factor, it seems that a lot of people use the mini size, like the Blade, to learn. So going in I knew I wanted a CP, I had a limited budget and I fully expect to crash this thing, given my past flying experience, so parts need to be readily available. The Blade fit the bill. It's a 3D capable CP model. I got mine used for $100 on e-bay. The local hobby shop (LHS in heli speak) stocks parts, sells them and can repair or trim them after a crash.

My plan for learning to fly is to use the "RADD Method". I've seen multiple references to this method in forums and articles all over the web so it seems to be the way to go. Basically the RADD method involves going through 9 battery charges with the aircraft on the ground. You learn to control the throttle and tail over the first two batteries then add the elevator(forward/backward) and aileron(left/right) over the next several while increasing the speed of the main rotor until the heli is very near to lifting off. Finally, on battery 10 you hover. The general consensus seems to be that this is the best way to learn to hover with out crashing if you can resist the urge to try to take off through the 10 lessons. I also spent the last week watching you tube videos of people crashing their new helicopters to give me motivation in this area. If you're interested here's the link to the RADD method.

I would probably be remiss if I didn't mention that all of my research to date also recommends the use of a simulator. If you haven't seen these they are computer flight simulators with an R/C type, two joystick, controller. I expect that I'm not alone in not being very interested in this. I don't really want to play a video game, I want to fly a helicopter. So I'm skipping this recommendation as well.

So, in summary, I'm doing what I expect many people do when getting into this hobby. I skip all the sage advice of the experts and buy the most difficult type of helicopter to fly. I get a small heli because budget doesn't allow for anything more. I skip the simulator because it doesn't sound like fun. I'm going for it. Over the next few days you'll get to see how that works out and I'll share pics, video and any advice that might be useful. So stay tuned. I'm going to go home and see if my new toy is there!!!!