450 Align TRex 450 Pro v2 3 GX build

[Chompwat]

Well the waiting is over! I finally got,my hand on the 450 Pro that has been sitting hidden somewhere in my wife's wardrobe for the last 6 weeks. It's been an ordeal and a trial of patience.
Anyway I intended to do a full build log, however apart from a few bits last night I have pretty much built it today.
I'll attach a few photos of key stages.
The build itself was very straight forward, the quality of the Align kit is amazing.
A heli loving friend very kindly gave me a DFC conversion kit so that was incorporated in to the build.
I have run most,of my wiring internally, and could have done with slightly longer servo leads, likewise the supplied signal wires for the 3 GX were a bit on the short side.
I have mounted my 3GX in the upper position, and I am using a Spektrum AR6210 and satellite, with the main Rx mounted in the alternate giro position.
The only grumbles I have are:
Plastic ball link connectors for the DFC arms were an absolute pig to start on the threads. I may replace these as I'm not too confident they won't strip out.
The canopy fouls the main gear on the left side.
No torx key supplied for,the main blade screws.
All that's left is,to connect the rudder servo arm to the tail pitch slider, then set everything up.

Oh and work out why my 3 GX won't connect to the software on my PC!

- - - Updated - - -

My apologies for the random selection. I got carried away with the building and didn't take as a many pictures as originally intended.
And they won't appear in the order I uploaded them!
I will be repositioning the satellite so that the antennae are in the vertical plane

 

[Dizzle000]

looking good man i just picked up my 450 pro 3gx today starting to build it as i type lol watchin tonys build vids to help me out, as this is my first heli build did you run into any majour problems during your build?

 

[Chompwat]

Hey Diz,
Tony's videos are a great source, to the point that I barely used the manual except for some of the exploded views.
I also watched Freddy Can Fly's time lapse video.
There are a number of ways of attacking the build. I chose to pretty well build up one side of the fuselage, then add the second side. The manual has both sides bolted to the bearing blocks more or less straight away.
If you haven't got one, get yourself an extra long 1.5mm handled Allen wrench. This is invaluable and you can still just about get to the motor mounting bolts to adjust the gear backlash once the servos are installed.
I didn't experience any major problems. Just niggly ones.
For example, the shrink tube covering the ESC extends way over the motor feed wires and fouled the motor pinion. I trimmed it right back and bent the wires back on themselves and gained a quarter of an inch clearance.

I really enjoyed the build and I am sure you will to.
Mine took about ten hours to build. I stripped and rebuilt everything, thread locked all metal fixings and greased all bearings, gears and shafts where needed.
Check everything, for some reason the factory will thread lock some bolts while others are virtually falling out. The tail pitch slider was a good example of this.
Anyhow, this was my first build of this type and was a great experience.
Good luck and enjoy.
Chomps.

 

[Dirk]

Hi Chomps,

Congrats! You are going to fall in love with this heli. I had the same problem with my canopy touching the main gear. The problem is that there is NO space inside the canopy with the battery in its usual position. If the Deans connector gets in the way or ends up above the battery, it forces the canopy skew. Play around with the positioning of the Deans connector.

 

[Chompwat]

Thanks Dirk.
My canopy is all out of shape, it seems to have distorted on the left side.
I imagine this is from being crammed into a tiny box along with everything else.
Even without the battery installed it fowls the gear on the left
I will try gently applying some heat from my heat gun, but being fibreglass I'm not sure how effective this will be.
If not the Dremel will have to come out to play!

I can't wait to get his bird in the air.
Given that this is not a fly out of the box job I have bought some training gear in case she tips over or does other crazy things on the maiden.

Tidying up, and setting up,today!

 

[Tony]

The heat gun will work perfectly for reforming the canopy. You just need to heat up the paint/resin and reform it. Just make sure not to use too much heat as it will destroy the paint.

 

[Slobberdog]

Just a word of warning, on the maiden take it slow if you have training gear on, as the vibes tend to do strange things to the 3Gx units, oh and make sure your wires are not tight as that transfers vibes into the unit as well, I find it worked really well by popping it up into the air, but I had practice as the 130x I have don't like sitting on the floor when running,

 

[Dirk]

Good idea on the training gear. I did the same on my initial flights until I forgot to put them on one day. It actually flies better without the training gear. never used training gear since then. What version software are you running on your 3GX? I updated mine immediately to V3.1.

I hope you get the canopy sorted. Tony's suggestion will work fine.

 

[Chompwat]

Well the heat gun worked a treat. I may work it a bit more, I have about 3mm clearance on both sides now.

As soon as I am happy it will spool up and lift without flopping on to its side the training gear will come off.

The pitch and aileron servo wires are quite tight going in to the 3GX. They needed to be about half inch longer the way I've routed them.

I have been having trouble getting my 3GX to connect to my PC, seems to be a thing with Windows 7 32 Bit. I've got a few things to try this evening. Once I get it to connect I will upgrade the firmware to 3.1.

Slobberdog, I have a Blade 130x as well. I know what you mean, pop it in the air as quickly as possible. Great fun though!

 

[Tony]

I just thought of this. On your desktop, right click the 3GX icon and select "Open File Location". In there, you should see an icon that says "Application" to the right of it. Right click on that and select "Run As Administrator". This may help get you connected. But, don't let this computer bug hold you back, you can set it up without the computer. I have the videos shot, but I need to dig my computer out of storage to get to the files to finish part 4 and 5 of the Flight Mode setup to make this thing just stupid stable. However, I can walk you through it if you need me to. It's pretty simple once you do it a couple times.

 

[Chompwat]

I've done it! All connected and 3GX upgraded to 3.1, yee ha!!
It seems with Windows 7 32 Bit OS you only get one hit at downloading the driver, which it failed to do on the first connection.
I uninstalled the software again and ran windows update to get everything up to speed.
Again it would not connect. I followed your advice and went into Device Manager, right clicked on the yellow exclamation mark and searched the Internet for a driver. This downloaded successfully and the 3GX connected within a few seconds.
This is well worth remembering if anyone else encounters this. It certainly seems to be a problem with this OS.
Apparently Windows 7 64 Bit doesn't have the same issue, or XP.. Couldn't say for Windows 8 or Vista!

Anyway, thanks again for the suggestions.

Now I've flashed my 3GX kits onward and upward with the DIR mode settings.

 

[Tony]

Vista and 7 should be the same when it comes to drivers, but all I use is 7 x64 on all of my computers. Glad you got it going though.

 

[Chompwat]

Valuable lessons learned! I clearly had a real dumb moment when I centred the servos and plugged the pitch servo in to the gear channel on the Rx and centred it there.
Of course it is not centred at all and has got to come out.
However as I enjoyed building this so much, I have decided to part dismantle the fuselage and reroute my aileron and pitch servo wires at the same time.
I ran mine over the tops of the lower main bearing blocks emerging under the anti rotation bracket. This looks very tidy but the wires are just a tad on the tight side for my liking.
I will probably now route them over the top of the upper main bearing block, it won't look as neat but there will be more lead to play with.
If anyone has pics of there wiring runs they can post I would be grateful.

Tidy but tight!!!

 

[Chompwat]

She flies!!!
Maidened ten minutes ago.

After the first screw head rounded out I decided to leave the wiring as it is, especially as I gained a couple of mm on the pitch servo wire which is the one I was concerned about.
With the pitch servo arm properly centred I commenced the CCPM set up.
My fears of the links on the DFC arms were confirmed as a good yank on one stripped the threads. Better on the bench than mid air! A new set were just as difficult to start but at least they cut a good thread once they got going.
The swash needed dropping about three turns all round to get to zero pitch mid stick.
From that point it was fairly straightforward, although the instruction book is dire!
I've gone for 11 deg cyclic, 10 deg collective.
Throttle and pitch curves programmed in to the DX6i, followed by a thorough once over, well actually wide over and it was time to fit the training gear.
A couple of spool ups to check for any unusual vibes went well.

Shaky knees, wife on the iPad and the moment had arrived.

She popped straight up with no dramas everything seems sweet, no horrible shudders or shakes. The tail creeps clockwise slightly but otherwise everything was better than I could have ever hoped for.
Nothing more than a bit of hovering for this first flight. But it's a flight nonetheless!
And I am so very pleased!
There is video which I will post once In due course.

Chomps

 

[Chompwat]

Maiden flight video.

YouTube

 

[Dizzle000]

Hey man there was an error with ur vid prolly just my ipad lol .anyhow I got a question I've ran into a little issue besides that fact that my flysky controller went haywire on me,and wouldn't let me set anything up ,cause the aleron stick was doing something funky kept twitching and such (I made another thread hoping I could fix it) so after hearing some advice that I tend to follow with everything else I do, first buy new,buy good= buy once so I went out and picked up a spectrum dx8 controller and a few extra satellites .HOLY CRAP this is so nice and the menu is suuuuper simple love it. Sorry I got off topic. Anyhow my question is once I centre all the servo in dir mode mine went exactly 90 they are as close as I can get shouldi add sub trim befor or after I instal them to make them perfect 90? Now everything is installed servos 90,this is where my problem is do I need to be in fmode 0 1 or 2? Because I have made all my links to spec as per Tony's vids and the Manuel ,but when I go mid stick have negative pitch how much I dunno don't have the blades on and when I go full up stick I get prolly 0 pich Mabey a bit positive. Do I need to extend all 3 lower links to make 0 pitch mid stick, or do I adjust it threw the upper 2 links? Sorry if Mabey I posted in the wrong thread just thought this would be the place to ask this question. Thanks
Kyle

 

[Chompwat]

Hey Kyle, I can only say what happened in my build, wether that is right or not I couldn't say, so this comes with that as a health warning. I'm sure someone else with more experience will soon chime in.
Firstly though the DX8 is a serious bit of kit that I am sure you will be well pleased with. I will have to stick with my DX6i for the time being, though I have run out of slots in the model memory.
As for your question, I would install the servos first.
The reason being if you sub trim them to a perfect 90 before installation, and you end up reversing one, you in effect reverse the sub trim as well if that makes sense. So if you added 5 deg of sub trim to achieve a perfect 90, but then have to reverse that servo you will in fact now be 10 deg out.
Install the servos first get your CCPM set up by reversing the odd servo out, and reversing swash mix from +60 to -60 where necessary to get everything moving in the right directions
Then use sub trim to achieve your perfect 90. Then you can level your swash.
It shouldn't matter at this stage which F mode you are in as long as it is a linear pitch curve, ie. 0, 25, 50, 75, 100.
You will program your flight modes later on, but for now mid stick must be at 50.
In DIR mode at mid stick you should then be able to set your pitch to 0.
You can achieve this by lengthening or shortening the head links or the swash links, but remember the swash travel is determined only by the length of the swash links.
I had the opposite situation where I had too much positive, and had to shorten my links to achieve zero
I wound my head links fully in and backed out two full turns to allow for blade tracking adjustments.
I had set my three swash links at 32.5mm between centres, added length to one by one turn to achieve a level swash, then had to shorten all three links by three full turns to achieve my 0 pitch.
I used Tony's zip tie method to level my swash, and it must have worked because I consistently achieved +/- 11 deg on full positive and negative collective pitch using a digital pitch gauge (a really good investment)
Just remember that once you have achieved a level swash you must adjust each swash link by the same amount to maintain that level.

Anyhow, that's how I did it. I haven't checked my blade tracking as yet

I hope that answers your questions and that you have as much fun building yours as I have had.

Good luck

Chomps.

- - - Updated - - -

Vid should now work. My fault! I forgot to set it for a public audience. Oops!!!

 

[Slobberdog]

Good maiden chomps, looked nice, Tony gave me some nice settings if you want to make it nice and stable, I will look for them later for you.

 

[Chompwat]

Good maiden chomps, looked nice, Tony gave me some nice settings if you want to make it nice and stable, I will look for them later for you.

Thanks mate, that would be cool!

 

[Tomhintz]

I also am building my new t Rex 450 Pro 3G X and am a little confused (I know, a little for now....) about setting up the 3G X. I have two Spektrum satellite RX and a DX6i but there is something about the govenor from what I am reading that is complicated by the DX6i? Is that right? Do I need a govenor? I've never had a govenor that I know of and kind of resent the idea just based on how it sounds. I am looking for simplicity and just a helo to that flies normally. I can wait for the violent 3D stuff...