450 Align Se V2 (hk450gt) Rebirth

Tony

Staff member
I woke up this morning and started working on the HK450GT that @Paulster2 sent to me along with my very first helicopter, the Razor 450. I already had the plan on taking all of the electronics out of it and putting in it what I had in my SE V2.

In the HK were a full set (4) of the tried and true MG90S servos which in their day were about the best servo you could get and still save some money. At my request he installed the Dynam Razor ESC and motor to save some money in this very expensive hobby. Those two are going back into the Razor. But not before I replace that extremely soft pinion which is about wore completely out. Paul also purchased a Turnigy Tx and in the heli was the HK-TR6A V2 receiver which I will be replacing with a receiver that I need to do a review on lol. Also taken off the HK and is being put back on the Razor is the craptastic Detrum GY192 gyro. It did work, but being piezoelectric it has its issues.

So once I stripped it down and split the frame in half (you have to in order to remove or install the servos lol) I decided this was a great time to not only install the Tarot Main Shaft block which is one solid piece and provides a wall to keep from chafing wires on the main shaft, but I also decided to install the Tarot V3 aluminum tail block. The stock SE V2 or HK450GT has a very small tail block and a separate block that holds the tail drive gear. The V3 block (which I had in my old Align SE V2, but was the plastic Align version. Still great, but I wanted the bling lol) takes those two pieces and makes them one. Must stronger with this solid aluminum tail and main shaft block.

I had modified my old helicopter where I could lower the battery and use a Pro canopy on it. I have decided to not do this on this helicopter. I'm going to stick with the plastic canopy that came with it. This is the white one, not that craptastic red one they like to send...

So with it stripped down went ahead and installed my Emax ES09MD servos in the cyclic, and I put an Align DS520 tail servo on it along with the GP780 tail gyro. I also installed a black Align Helical main gear, but kept the black HK auto gear so that it was all black lol. So the only white gear is the tail drive gear.

The head is the Align flybar head with solid links and I replaced the tail boom with Align as well just like my old heli. I still need to find my old 450MX Align motor (I think that is the number of the one I have) so that I can get it installed and running. The motor is going to be paired with the Align 35 amp ESC as well.

Blades I'm up in the air with but I think I'm just going to put the white with black stripe fiberglass blades on it. I have proven that you can't toss thing thing around in the air otherwise you will spin the flybar paddles. Video below of what happens when you do that lmao.

I am very excited to get this helicopter back in the air. I thought about firing up a live stream to do all of this, but those long streams just don't do very well lol. I have been working on this helicopter for about 4 hours, but for a complete ground up, touch every bolt rebuild, that's about right. Pair that with having to find parts that I have had stashed for quite a while and yea, it takes some time lol.

I am now just waiting for the wife to get home with some double sided tape that @Geena suggested and uses on her helicopters and I will get all of this stuff mounted. Maiden flight??? Yea, when it warms up lmao. It was like 5ºF this morning and it's not warming up that much. For you metric guys that is negative a metric crap ton. Cold, nuff said lmao.

Here is the video of the flybar paddle issue that I have had with this helicopter for years. I just face the fact that you can't go high rates with this heli unless you want to put locking carbon fiber paddles on it...

 

Tony

Staff member
No love for the classics? lmao

I will be putting this helicopter on the bench today and starting the series of Maintenance on Helicopters. Once I'm done with this one, I think you guys will like what I have planned for the second video in this series.
 

Tony

Staff member
Today, I spent way too much time on this helicopter. I wanted to get it back to its old ways, but I wanted to make it BETTER! As you all know, it has pretty much Align everything now including the had, so it is pretty much a real SE V2 now.

So I starrted out with wanting to do some MAJOR wire management. If you think running a Pro is hard, try one of these some time lmao. Just a nightmare to wire cleanly. I decided that I was going to go ahead and shorten some wires, and I ended up shortening two of them. The rudder and the ESC. I am placing my Rx on the lower plate with the wires facing the motor, so the ESC wire was just stupid long lol. The other servo, the rudder, sits just behind the gyro for the tail so I was able to take a LOT of wire off of this servo. I left the cyclic servos alone for now, but I think I'm going to take a cm or two off of them. I ended up routing them in a way that uses way more wire than it should just to try and save the length, but I think I'm still going to shorten them.

From there, I fired up a live stream (actually the live stream was before the servo wires lol) and completely rebuild the end of the tail. I found some Align tail blade grips that looked awesome and was smooth as can be, so I put them on. Once I got the other grips off though, I noticed the shaft was bent. So I put an Align shaft in there and put everything back together.

Then it was time to set the helicopter up. Everyone has seen me setup a flybar head, so no video of that. But maybe I should have made a video because I had one issue that was just flat kicking my butt on this dude.

As you know, my last SE V2 met its demise when I absolutely plowed it into the ground at almost full pitch. Talk about a thud, I would have expected that sound from a larger helicopter hitting the ground lol. But it was a complete loss as far as the frame was concerned. But thanks to Paul, I had this one to take its place. So with all new parts installed, it was time to start setting up the head. I grabbed my tried and true analog pitch gauge and started checking pitch. I had more positive than negative, so I adjusted, then more negative than positive, so I met it in the middle. Pitch was about .75º off which I was fine with. I don't plan on doing any 3D with this thing any time soon lmao.

So I was done with the pitch setup so I swung the head around (should have checked this way sooner than this) and checked the other blade, and it was over 4º off!! What the hell. I checked and double checked linkages, downloaded the manual and set links per the manual and just kept on with this for about an hour. Finally it dawned on me, THE FRIGGIN FEATHERING SHAFT IS BENT! What a bonehead oversight!

So I try to find another shaft and I have NONE! I decided to take a shaft out of the Tarot head since the stock HK450GT shaft is way shorter than this head needs and low and behold, it's an Align feathering shaft. I pull this sucker apart and notice that it also has Align thrust bearings! But one of the bolts is not all the way in.... Turns out, the long bolts that Tarot uses will not work in align shafts. Align doesn't drill and tap their hole as deep. Interesting.

Whatever, I have an Align feathering shaft, I have a set of Align thrust bearings and they are going into an Align head. Perfect. I get it all back together and...... This shaft has a bend in it as well. WTF!!! But this bend is very slight, if anything it will cause a very very slight vibration. Screw it, I'm setting this head up. I get it all put back together and I still have over a 4º discrepancy in pitch blade to blade....

So I start looking at everything, and I mean everything. First thing I found was the linkages going from the mixing arms to the blade grips were Tarot... Should be exactly the same, right? NOPE! There is a 1.5mm difference if I remember correctly. I remembered that I had a complete set of links in the studio though so I went out there for about the 5th time tonight and grabbed them. I linked it all up with brand new Align links and.... STILL FRIGGIN OFF!!! Okay, WTF Seriously....

Now, the old man glasses are put on and I'm looking at alignment of mixing arms, washout arms, EVERYTHING that I can think of that would cause this, and then I see it. The linkage ball on the blade grip was bend down just slightly. When I hit the ground, it bent the crap out of the ball threads. Thankfully, it was just the ball.

BUT, I have a brand new set of blade grips just sitting out there in the studio and I thought I had a new thrust bearing set but I didn't. Yet another trip out there to the studio and there it is, the blades are identical! Pitch is setup and life is good. Until i spooled it up without blades on it.

I hit the throttle and this thing shot up to speed like a friggin rocket. Definitely in plane mode, but this is the Align 35a ESC which I don't remember ever changing. Then I realized, this is the ESC that was given to me, not my original one. So I got the pleasure :/ of going through ESC setup via the Tx. It actually was not that bad though. I thought about setting up governor on this one, but I remember someone saying something about it not working that well, so I just put it on helicopter with a soft start. I also changed it from hard acceleration to the middle so that hopefully normal to iu1 will not be so abrupt and more like castle. We will find out when I fly it.

After all of that (there was more that went on with it, but I figure this post is getting long enough at this point) the helicopter is setup and is ready for it's maiden flight. When will the maiden flight be? I guess as soon as we have weather to actually do it. Tomorrow is going to suck for weather. Rain, all day....

But I"m happy to have my old helicopter back, that is for sure. This was my first, what I like to call, REAL Helicopter. I'm not counting the Razor as a real heli lol. I hated it when I decided to take my other heli apart and put it in a bag. But it was not salvageable. I did decide to keep the stock canopy on it though and NOT put the Pro canopy on it. Mainly because I didn't want to modify the battery mount like I had to on my old one. But who knows, maybe I will do some modding to this one in the near future lmao. Only time will tell....
 

Smoggie

Well-Known Member
Tony,

As for the FB paddles turning.. The problem must be an aerodynamic instability of the paddle that makes them try to flip round when RPM and aerodynamic forces are high. The paddles should really be weighted at the leading edge (like main blades are) so that they balance around 20-25% of chord. I'm guessing that higher end paddles would have such weight added. The 'Bullet' main blades you see sometimes on plastic blades on micro helis are an effort to achieve this same thing, the 'bullet' adds weight out front to move the CG forward and thus stabilise the blade.

This is speaking from a theoretical point of view because I have almost no experience of flybar helis but i'm pretty sure that is what is causing them to spin around.
 

Tony

Staff member
I was thinking it was much simpler than that. I think the paddles just didn't have enough grip on the flybar shaft and at extreme angles (I think I was running 10º of cyclic in that flight at full deflection) the air pressure against the trailing edge was just too much for the paddles to handle. I am now running Align flybar paddles and an Align black flybar which is rougher than the one that was on the heli in the video.

But I do know exactly what you mean by the weighted blades. It's pretty much all I fly with on the little micros since it doesn't decrease performance hardly at all, but adds quite a bit of stability to the helicopter.
 

Tony

Staff member
So after all of that work, the helicopter formerly known as the HK450GT is now ready for its maiden flight! The Align head is completely rebuilt and setup perfectly, the servos should provide plenty of speed for the kind of smack hovering that I do, the tail is buttery smooth and we are just waiting on its time to see some air for the first time! So to all of ya'll, I present to you, the SE V2 (needs a name)!

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