Building my second gyro - this one electric

[kerb]

Just found this forum so I thought I'd post a couple of pictures of my first attempt at an autogyro.

It managed about 10 circuits before its unfortunate demise.

I'm now building a replacement, and being a gluton for punishment, I've decided on an slightly larger electric pusher version. Hopefully it will fly a little better than its older sister!

[JWarren]

Thats a nice looking gyro! Any plans on trying to get to fly right? What do you think the problem was with that bird?

John

[motorbikemike]

Those arn't heli blades are they? if so that might have been the problem.

BTW that is a beautiful machine. what head did you use.

[David A Ramsey]

I'm curious about the mast angle. Your Gyro looks like a small Whopper.

David

[kerb]

The head came off a Kyosho Convert EX fixed pitch electric heli. The Convert had Clarke Y type blades with approx 60cm diameter, I don't think the Convert flew well as a heli so when I picked one up second hand I thought to try making a gyro.

The whole shaft and head arrangement pivoted on a dowel in the bottom of the fuselage allowing me to adjust the mast angle between flight attempts. I think it was at about 10 degrees (w.r.t. tail) on its best flight.

Power came from a .15 glow. I think she was over weight for rotor size - it had six servos in it: throttle, head pitch, head roll, rudder, and split elevator operating as elevons.

First flight lasted about 3 seconds and she rolled uncontrollably to the left. I have a video in .MOV format which I'll try and post, this plays in my XP media player, but I don't know how well it will work for others. I was kicking myself for taking off as it had supposed to be a fast taxi run! I hadn't finalised mixer settings and they were set with almost no movement on the head servos and all control from the tail. I don't think the elevons really had much authority due to being so short.

Bad news was a broken plastic head, and try as I may I couldn't get any spares as I think this was a 1980's heli. In the end I machined replacement parts from ali.

After this first take off it no longer wanted to get off the ground until I fitted a tuned pipe for an extra 30% power. This got me off the ground and I managed about ten circuits at full throttle. She flew fast (even by fixed wing standards) and turns were a nightmare with each 90 degree turn losing about 60 feet of altitude - hence each circuit was very big to gain enough height for the turn round!

Flight ended when I backed off to about 1/2 throttle and she dropped like a brick, I opened throttle again and just about arrested the descent before pancaking on the runway with the blades flexing down to slice the fuselage in two!

I was delighted to have got her to fly, but with more broken plastic parts I couldn't face the rebuild.

Kerb.

[kerb]

OK, here's the video (http://www.anchorinserts.com/auto1.MOV), its about 4Mb in .MOV format.

Kerb