Had a problem; the main rotor blades showed resistance, although not a lot, however this can cause the battery or ESC to run hotter than usual. My other V450 blades will keep turning when twirled and released by my finger. I tracked the problem, thinking it was the one-way bearing; it was not. The metal gasket that goes between the bottom rudder gear and the top main gear was seated too tightly. Strangely when I replaced the bottom rudder gear the rotor blades twirled as smoothly as my other V450. So I see not all of these plastic gears may be exactly to spec; some can be thicker than others when it comes to seating the washer against it and the main gear.

How many times can you spin the rotor head or rather how many times will it spin by itself once run up by hand. I think generally about 3 or 4 complete revolutions is ok, wait until the belt really breaks in and loosens up and the bearings break in. The heli will feel a lot better in the air and fly longer. unfortunantly it takes a good season of flying the heli with the same components for this to happen or at least not the "Big" crash, where you replace a whole bunch of critical parts

The longer you can keep it in the air without crashing the better it will fly, I know that obvious right...... but when new everything is so tight.

A fast finger spin will yield about 7 full rotations on both my V450's. Keep in mind one of these was bought only about a month ago. The washer was definitely causing the resistance. I think a few folks may have replaced their on-way bearings when this could have actually been the cause. The tolerances of washer between the main and rudder plastic gears can be too tight. So one would do well to check this before replacing the one-way bearing or other bearings and/or parts. It may not mean as much on a V450 without a full fuselage. Then again it may mean the difference between a cool running heli and losing control due to an overheated ESC.

Originally Posted by urrl

A fast finger spin will yield about 7 full rotations on both my V450's. Keep in mind one of these was bought only about a month ago. The washer was definitely causing the resistance. I think a few folks may have replaced their on-way bearings when this could have actually been the cause. The tolerances of washer between the main and rudder plastic gears can be too tight. So one would do well to check this before replacing the one-way bearing or other bearings and/or parts. It may not mean as much on a V450 without a full fuselage. Then again it may mean the difference between a cool running heli and losing control due to an overheated ESC.

I hear you and I will definately check my auto rotation gear for binding at the shaft sleeve.

I only fly my V450 on the weekends and then not every weekend so its not really my daily flyer. Sounds like you got them broken in already but I think you fly them almost everyday so that makes sense. I also fly the walkera micros since i dont really have much room, so its a switch off.

As Im sure you know, the best tail is the torque tube tail, when i land after a full flight with the trex 450-pro the heli takes almost 60 seconds to spin down to a complete stop. But the problem with that tail is it will strip if it hits anything and is expensive to repair...the belt is definately better for endurance.

My belt is still tight I only get about 3 or 4 rotations when I spin up real fast and let go, but i get 6 min of flight time on the stock battery and since I upgraded the esc to a 60A/3A switched, it comes down warm at the most. The stock motor still gets way to hot, it does have great power and for it to get hot is normal on this heli, but maybe I can make it better......

An added note concerning those batteries I mentioned from Value Hobby, I flew around for about 6 minutes, then hovered close for an extra 2 minutes before the motor showed signs of decreasing speed and battery run down. So 8 minutes with a full fuselage. Meanwhile the new stock battery seems to be showing signs of swelling. I've been running all of these batteries for about 5 minutes, including landing time. I may order some more of these 30C batteries from Value Hobby since they are only about $19 a piece. They do a great job IMO.


I notice the stock battery has no specs at all on the label.

Stock battery is 2200mah/25c, on my stock pack......its written in black on the opposite side of the silver lable. Since its black on black its hard to see.

Some really good packs you might consider are the GensAce brand from hobbypartz.com, they also offer free priority shipping with an order over 25.00. They are getting rave reviews from other pilots who use onboard data-loggers to test thier power systems in flight with graph analysis. I buy all my generic batts from them now, and the name brands from the LHS (Voltz) which are a little more. Gone are the days of ThunderPower 70.00 a pack 2200/45c's. These Gensace are almost as good and the voltz are just as good IMO & can give 100's of cycles if treated right. Plus they can be charged at 5c.

http://www.hobbypartz.com/gensace3s25c.html

Looks good; thanks much for the tip. Cool price too.

Originally Posted by urrl

Looks good; thanks much for the tip. Cool price too.

Unfortunantly they just bumped up thier free shipping to 50.00 minimum order, it was 25.00 a month or so ago, but i think they do a flat 4.95 rate for batteries. I would be curious to see what your results are with these, they have a 2600/25c that might work better with the fuse you have.

Honestly though you should probably be running a 45c for the extra headroom so your not frying the lipo with the extra fuse weight.

My most recent improvement to the V450 was to mount the esc under the battery tray to shift the COG forward, because stock out of the box the V450 seemed tail heavy to me. So I had to mount the battery forward and that caused a problem with getting the canopy on. Now I can put the battery all the way up & back towards the servos and theres room to spare for a longer lipo.

I'm using hobbypartz'z sky lipo 2200mah 40c packs and they seem to work well, just a little warm after a full run.

Nearly had a whoops moment today as I made a collective pop... turns out having a higher head speed is indeed quite important!

The torque got away from the tail and it nearly paid a horrible visit to the graveyard behind my flats as you shall see briefly if you watch this:

V450D01 Low Throttle Curve (1 min 1 sec)

New pair of shorts please.

I increased the curve 10% throughout and it improved back to the original behaviour and I later discovered that in idle-up 1 the tail was totally solid.


Otherwise, things went well today, I used the swash leveller tool I finally received today after it having made a stupid world tour before arriving at my place, I used the similarly well travelled pitch gauge to check my pitch (-8/+8) and flew 2 packs without a crash (just).
Looks like it's time to go to the field and learn to fly this thing.


RE: recent posts...

Hand turn head rotations.
On mine, I can get about 5 or 6 full rotations out of a fast hand windup of the head. As long as that one way doesn't stick then it all spins quite nicely.

Batteries.
I'm using the stock 2200mAh 25C plus 2 STORM 2200mAh 35C.
They all come in warm +40C (though it is +30C in Japan at the moment).
One STORM appears to have some gas build-up after 5 cycles. I just got a Turnigy 2200mAh 40C which I have yet to try.
It seems, despite the Gens Aces being made next to Hong Kong it's nigh impossible to get them here and shipping back from hobbyparts means I need to buy about 10 or more to make the postage remotely bearable.
What sort of voltage are you all getting after a flight? I'm down around 10.8V and I'm wondering if I should reduce my flight times by 30s/1m to stress them a little less.

I just found this:

http://www.4-max.co.uk/pdf/What%20th...Po%20cells.pdf

Seems an nice concise guide to the information which is available but often not all in one place.

Thanks for sharing that info thwaitm.
My camo full fuselage V450 was overheating and going out of control after about 2 to 3 minutes in hover. I looked at the WOW setup sheet and adjusted almost everything back to specs and it no longer goes out of control. Notably out of spec was a high pitch curve. Stock ESC's have no heat fins on them. don't know why.
I need a water cooled ESC.

I took the advice of HF711 and got myself a 60A ESC with 4A BEC.

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/s...dproduct=10942

I installed it last night under the battery tray as per your suggestion Urrl.
I hope to take it out today or tomorrow to see how it flies.
It has logging capabilities (I'm a bit of a geek for graphs) so I'll be curious to see how many amps this is drawing.

For those with the GE Power B6 type chargers out there and it appears to work fine for others, on the battery charging logging I suggest 'Logview V2'. Donationware.

http://www.logview.info/cms/e_logview_info.phtml

It's great software though it helps if you know a bit of German as not everything is correctly translated. Though for functionality it's by far the best logger I've seen and it's as cheap/expensive as you wish to donate.

Originally Posted by thwaitm

Nearly had a whoops moment today as I made a collective pop... turns out having a higher head speed is indeed quite important!

The torque got away from the tail and it nearly paid a horrible visit to the graveyard behind my flats as you shall see briefly if you watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYQLmFHBskE

New pair of shorts please.

I increased the curve 10% throughout and it improved back to the original behaviour and I later discovered that in idle-up 1 the tail was totally solid.


Otherwise, things went well today, I used the swash leveller tool I finally received today after it having made a stupid world tour before arriving at my place, I used the similarly well travelled pitch gauge to check my pitch (-8/+8) and flew 2 packs without a crash (just).
Looks like it's time to go to the field and learn to fly this thing.


RE: recent posts...

Hand turn head rotations.
On mine, I can get about 5 or 6 full rotations out of a fast hand windup of the head. As long as that one way doesn't stick then it all spins quite nicely.

Batteries.
I'm using the stock 2200mAh 25C plus 2 STORM 2200mAh 35C.
They all come in warm +40C (though it is +30C in Japan at the moment).
One STORM appears to have some gas build-up after 5 cycles. I just got a Turnigy 2200mAh 40C which I have yet to try.
It seems, despite the Gens Aces being made next to Hong Kong it's nigh impossible to get them here and shipping back from hobbyparts means I need to buy about 10 or more to make the postage remotely bearable.
What sort of voltage are you all getting after a flight? I'm down around 10.8V and I'm wondering if I should reduce my flight times by 30s/1m to stress them a little less.

The 80% rule for lipo's is that you dont take out more than 80% of the batteries capacity during a flight. 2200 x 80% = 1760mah per flight. You can also guage it by determining end of flight voltage on the lipo, which should be around 3.7v per cell or 11.1v. It helps greatly if you have a computerized battery charger so you can see how many MAH's you put back into the battery after flight. As a test, if you fly with a fully charged lipo for 5 min and say put 1700 mah's back into the battery, just divide 1700/5 and you can get your mah's per min used measurement. Then you know how long you can fly based on the batteries capacity and dividing it by 80%, and how much mah's your heli uses per min.

Lipos are a highly debated suject, but theyve come down in price so much now that really if you fry a 15.00 battery in a season........no one really gets upset about that anymore When they cost 70.00 a pack though people got heated.

Personally, with the V450 I fly with a 5:00 min timer set on a 2200/25-45c and try not to go below 11.1v per cell end of flight. A lipo will rebound slightly a few .v's so if you go a little below it's ok. But remember its not so much what the battery is doing when you land but what is happening in the air, which under load the battery could be reaching close to 9V or 3v per cell.......way less than what you read when you land on a meter. I have some Turnigy 2200/25c's from last summer with 100+ cycles on them that still give a full power 5 min flight.

That PDF you posted is great info, the only part that is outdated are the C ratings for charge rate, most batteries today, even the cheap ones can be safely charged @ 5c (Always Check the Lable). It will however still degrade the life of the battery, the lowest C charge you can do will always be the best. At the field when im flying I do a 2.5 C charge rate on the 2200's or 4.8A, but at home I will do a .800mah charge or less than 1/2 C to extend the life of my lipos. A 2200mah 11.1v lipo @ 5C = 11A max charge, which would get your lipo fully charged in about 15 min's or less.

Proper C rating for the application, flight times and charge times will get the most out of your lipos, also storing them at 3.82v per cell in the off season or in between flights ( over 48hrs) is recommended by many. With some of the Cheaper Chinese cells it is normal for the lipo to swell a little during discharge and then go down after about 1/2 hour back to normal.

The one last thing to mention is the power system on the V450 IMO is underated. They use a 40A esc with a 3A Linear BEC to power all the digital servo's and the RX, The 40A is ok and so is the 3A Bec, the issues is that the BEC is linear and not switched and this can generate a Ton of heat. Or excessive draw on the lipo, plus we all know how hot the stock motor gets By using a 60A/3A switched ESC, the motor still gets hot but the lipo stays within range after a 5 min flight.

Looks like I'm in the mood for two of those 60A ESC's; the stock ESC's still give problems occasionally with a full fuselage and I don't need to keep flying wondering when the ESC will overheat.

EDIT: Just ordered the ESC's from Hobbyking.