Has it really been that long?
I can’t believe its been so long since I posted to this blog. Between work, flying, family, and just plain life, its been forgotten for some time. So, whats transpired since last season in the way of flying progress, new acquisitions, changes in the fleet?
Over the winter and early spring I went through both nitro 600′s and did a lot of maintenance and upgrades. On N01 (names as it was my first nitro heli), I replaced the main bearing blocks with new metal ones, and a new set of bearings, upgraded to a carbon fiber tail boom, new clutch/engine bearings, new clutch liner, and replaced the ball links to remove any slop. On N02 (my second nitro), new main bearings (already had metal bearing blocks), replaced the washout base as it was worn and developed some slop, new canopy as the last one was starting to crack in places, new ball links, changed to a set of white landing gear to replace the black, new set of blades, and new tail rotor bearings. I also upgraded the OS50 to an OS55 in N02, now they are both running OS55s are more consistent in performance than before.
On the flight progress front, I’ve progressed quite a bit by tightening up death spirals, falling knife edge, working with linking maneuvers together for more interesting turnaround maneuvers, and starting to work on sustained inverted hovering and more backwards flight. I’ve been working on tic-tocs, but haven’t got the timing right. Every now and then I nail it and ‘toss back and forth’ once or twice which is the right timing, but I can’t sustain that and the heli starts to bog and descent. I hope this season will resolve that with some practice.
I purchased a new MD500E fuselage as a backup for my primary MD500E. I am asked to do demo flights at some events during the season, and always felt exposed that I’d might show up empty handed if a mishap should happen in the days before the event. With two of them, I can feel confident that if something happens to one, I’ve got the other. I’ll add some posts with pictures as I start building it.
Before building the new MD500E, I’m adding the navigation lights to the existing one. I’ve got most of the wiring and electronics soldered and testing, and am now fitting it all to the fuselage. I’ve also got some other scale goodies that are going in and will be updated in future posts.
I burned up the gas motor in my XtraFun by not checking the fuel prior to filling. Evidently, someone filled one of the 2 stroke gas/oil mix can with regular gas and no oil when they filled the other gas cans in the garage. I never checked when filling the XtraFun on the first flight of this season since I always add oil first to the cans, then add gas after. That helps me avoid this problem. I can say an engine will run pretty good without lubrication. But only for about 7 minutes 
Then it starts making noise 
I have a spare engine, so it will be back in the air shortly, but its a $600 expense I didn’t want to incur.
