700 My New T-Rex 700X Build

fran11784 said:
Looks like a great place to fly! Good job
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Hi fran11784, thanks for the thumbs up on the maiden. Since starting this thread so long back, I've seen many other videos on the same heli. I've got to admit that they all look at least twice as good as mine :throwup:

Our club's helipad is great and I've been working hard to recover it from the wild due to neglect. Latest improvement has been cutting back the grass at the end of the growing season. I can't change the fact that it's a bit of a long walk from the clubhouse with all the kit to have a day's flying but I've got a couple of ideas.

Bye now!
 
Heliman450 said:
Our club's helipad is great and I've been working hard to recover it from the wild due to neglect. Latest improvement has been cutting back the grass at the end of the growing season. I can't change the fact that it's a bit of a long walk from the clubhouse with all the kit to have a day's flying but I've got a couple of ideas.

Bye now!
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Phil,

Some clubs do seem to like to banish heli flyers away to the far flung corner of the field! The clubs around here dont seem too bad, they mainly seem happy to let the heli and fixed wing flyers co-exist, not that I fly at club fields very often.
 
Hi Steve,

My club's a long established fixed wing entity and I think the shock of seeing that some guys can throw their "flying object" all around the sky and they can't is the main reason for the anti-heli story. This is coupled together with some "powerful" individuals in the club who are still around to influence things in a negative way.

Both take-off points are a long way (relatively speaking) from the clubhouse and parking area but of course the runway needs much more space as does the approach and climb out steps in the process with the fixed wing models. The only thing that I can't understand is the insistence by the fixed wing guys that the heli guys are severely limited in their ceiling when they have no height restriction imposed on them from the outside authorities. There is no defensible reason for this other than the fixed wing guys outnumber the heli guys at the annual meeting when the rule changes are up for grabs.

I'm working slowly on the issue by demonstrating that not all heli pilots are crazy psychos whose only purpose in life is to damage people and property and infect the club with the cancer of drone pilots who will be taking footage of all the neighbours for publishing in the internet :goodevil:

Some of the fixed wing guys even admit to having a heli at home but only when we're on a 1-2-1 basis :biggrin1:

Seriously speaking, I think the real reason lies more with the cost of fixing a crashed heli (together with the embarrassment) rather than anything anyone can really put a finger on.

Bye for now!
 
Phil,

You touched on the 'club politics' issues that are one of the reasons i just cant be bothered with clubs. Strange thing i've found is that the guys who make most noise on a political level are usually the ones who fly least, or not at all, so the ridiculous rules they dream up dont affect them at all!. My father used be chairman of the local club back in Middlesbrough for several years when i was a lad and the crap he had to put up with from certain individuals was unbelievable. Personally I cant be bothered with it all, i just want to go fly and if possible shoot the breeze with a few likeminded RC enthusiasts.
The downside of flying where I do is that lately I'm often flying on my own. My regular flying buddy has been ill so doesnt get out as much, and some of the guys who used to show up quite often are too busy with work and young families.
 
Smoggie said:
Phil,

You touched on the 'club politics' issues that are one of the reasons i just cant be bothered with clubs. Strange thing i've found is that the guys who make most noise on a political level are usually the ones who fly least, or not at all, so the ridiculous rules they dream up dont affect them at all!. My father used be chairman of the local club back in Middlesbrough for several years when i was a lad and the crap he had to put up with from certain individuals was unbelievable. Personally I cant be bothered with it all, i just want to go fly and if possible shoot the breeze with a few likeminded RC enthusiasts.
The downside of flying where I do is that lately I'm often flying on my own. My regular flying buddy has been ill so doesnt get out as much, and some of the guys who used to show up quite often are too busy with work and young families.
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I agree with you Smoggie. I had a non welcome encounter when I tried to get into a club that just fly's planes and curse the heli flyer's. I'm an old fart but theses guys were ancient. You have to use W-D 40 to get them moving Lol. Anyway, I think they just maid up rules so I couldn't join. So flying alone isn't bad.
 
My main challenge ('problem' is non PC :biggrin1:) is that I'm not allowed to fly anywhere other than in a club environment. It just isn't allowed where I live in Switzerland, maybe elsewhere, but not here. There are a couple of others who I've bumped into at the heli pad but we don't have any regular get-together. There's a small group who meet in a sports hall not far away but that's obviously not involving such big helis as mine.

I think flying over to your rugby pitch in Aberdeen to join you is probably a bit extreme Steve, hey? :bellyroll:
 
Heliman450 said:
I think flying over to your rugby pitch in Aberdeen to join you is probably a bit extreme Steve, hey? :bellyroll:
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Your welcome anytime. The field is only a few miles from Aberdeen airport, though i dont think there are any direct flights to/from Switzerland. Itt might work out expensive if you did it every weekend...
 
I used to fly regularly Aberdeen to Zürich via Charles de Gaul with Airfrance when I was working at St. Fergus so know it very well. Who knows what the future brings?
 
Some clubs do seem to like to banish heli flyers away to the far flung corner of the field!
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Not to get off topic but this is so true^^. My club does just that. They make you fuel your nitro bird way down the end meanwhile there's a table FULL of lipos charging under the awning. lol
 
Hi all, I'm back on the case (thread :biggrin1:) with an update on progress..........

I'm getting on well with my household 'To-Do' List to keep 'she who must obeyed' happy before the festive days come upon us and have managed to do a lot of reading/interpreting the written word of the instructions from all the bits and pieces. It's a bit heavy going, but I'm seeking out the most important setting-up information from my Jeti DC-14 and the Axon gyro together with a bit of stuff from the Jeti REX7 receiver. I still haven't had my Rx. interface cable delivered yet and, therefore, can't update the firmware on both my 550 and the 700X. This means that I can't use all the telemetry stuff.

Next time I fly, I'd like to have everything working or at least more fine tuning details ready for implementation. Fingers crossed that it won't be too long.

Bye for now!
 
You sound like a man after my own heart Phil. Once I have everything is working perfectly I get bored and have to find stuff to tweak and upgrade. My new project related to the 700X is to rewind the already stupidly powerful Align BL850MX motor. When I got my spare airframe it came with another BL850MX installed. I'd assumed that the motor like the airframe was new but the seller conveniently forgot to tell me that the motor had been transferred from his previous trex 700L. It's actually in excellent condition apart from the shaft which looks like someone has taken a Dremel to for some reason:cussing: The shafts aren't expensive but do require an Arbor Press to remove, so I used the excuse to buy both the shaft and the press! Application of brute force and ignorance successfully removed the shaft.

Then I got to thinking that while I had the motor apart I might have a go at the mystical art of brushless motor re-winding:biggrin1: So that involved buying some 1.5mm copper magnet wire and other bits and bobs. I've re-wound smaller motors before but 1.5mm wire is hard to bend and I discovered needs some specialist tools to get tightly wound on the stator, so I've ordered those too.

Anyway, at the moment the motor is broken down to it's component parts, original copper windings removed and awaiting the special tools so I can start winding it again with the 1.5mm wire:

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The jury is out on if I can ever get it working again but the attempt will keep me out of mischief for a little while.
 
Hi Steve, sounds more like you're right into a LOT of mischief by choice :bellyroll: I'd be more inclined to just buy another brand new motor and leave the special tools alone. What is it you're buying exactly and why did you feel the urge to rewind the motor?

From my side, I'm just catching up on stuff I should have done earlier in the year (my bad) and just convinced myself that it didn't matter at the time. I never got round to learning all the ins and outs of the DC-14 as it's primarily an aeroplane Tx. and I doubt that I'll ever need those features. However, the manual's written without separating the unwanted stuff so I just find myself reading and then realising that I don't understand anything of what they're saying. Read it again and then realise I don't need it anyway :puke:

Seriously, now that I have a new gyro to learn new stuff about I need to get it all straight in my head. I've already rewritten the Jeti instructions to include my DC-14 (not included in the enclosed instructions) as I missed something very important in the setting up and it took me a few days to find out the solution. All part of the fun, but could have been avoided if I'd got my finger out sooner. I also need to set up the 'Horizon' feature of the Axon and a couple of other things, too.

Back to work!
 
Rewinding can change the Kv of a motor and it can make the motor more powerful, more efficient and cooler running. The idea is that by careful hand winding with a single thick wire you get more copper and so less electrical resistance than a sweatshop factory/machine wound motor that usually use multiple thin filaments of wire for ease of winding.

In the case of the 850MX it turns out that the stock motor (unlike many Align motors) is not a all bad, so i dont expect to see a big improvement, but it's an interesting challenge! I'm winding the same number of turns as stock so the Kv will be the same. Increasing Kv for higher revs would have made for a more powerful motor but a higher revving motor would screw up the gearing.
 
The hard part is bending the thick copper wire around the ends on the stator 'teeth' while keeping the wire nice and tightly packed against the stator. To do this the ideal tool is pliers that have parallel motion jaws which you need to grind down to be thin enough to fit in the gaps between the teeth. this is what the tool looks like:
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The basic 'Klipex' pliers are available on ebay but I'll need to grind the jaws down.
 
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Hi Steve, looks very interesting............ I'd like to see your video or photo sequence of the rewinding process. Not sure where the correct location is in the Forum but I'm sure you can come up with something :biggrin1:
 
I'll stick something in the 'motors' sub forum.

I'm hoping the special pliers arrive today or tomorrow as we have a storm blowing in which is going to mean no flying for a few days. I could do with something to keep me busy rather than spending all of the Christmas period eating and drinking too much.
 
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