Beautiful bird!

Threads like this inspire me!

Well this has been a long fought modification and I must say it is not just a bolt pieces on and your done one. I had a serious tail wag problem first off which turned out to be a combination of several things, tracking ( less than an 1/8" difference ) , a misaligned padded ( so little that it was only noticable upon spool-up with no blades ) , a out of balanced blade ( so very little it didn't hardly show up on my Heli-Max balancer ) , and .2mm of play in the tailrotor shaft gearbox. The one thing I have learned from this whole experiment is that the bigger the bird the more thing need to be correct because everything seems to be amplified 10x . I now have it to where it will hover very stabile and solid , no tail wag and moves around only from the wind now and not because it is chasing its self around. First nice day we get that the wind isn't blowing 40 I plan on taking it to the field and will try to get some video of the big bird in flight.

I am planning on putting this one in a Bell Long Ranger , but was wondering if anyone knows if the Long Ranger and 407 share the same basic fuselage or not ? I know there are some small differences like the vert. fins on the horizontal stab and some added intake ducts on the doghouse but other then these differences I can't make out any others. I would really like to do a 407 vs. a Long Ranger and don't think I can swing a MarvelCraft 407 although they seem very worth the money , I was thinking maybe one doing it up as one of these.

Video?

Speaking of tail box play...even an Align assembly needed some shims to take out the slop.

Yep .2mm shim.
Whent to the field friday to try and get some video , but when I got the heli out of the back seat of the truck the flybar was just flopping around . The odd thing is I had the blade holder on it and there was no way the FB could touch anything and it was very tite before I put it in the truck, hhmmmmm gremlins in the back seat of the Dodge I guess.
Got in all fixed up and ready to test but the Free Flight guys are out at the AMA this weekend so looks like it will be next week before I can try it. Hope to get some video of the big girl in flight , she's something to see and you have to spool her up slow with those big blades on her. One wouldn't think 100mm would be that big a deal but seems like shoehorning a V8 into a Smart car , the drivetrain seems to be ok with it but the head thinks other wise about it.

Any updates on this? I saw your vids on youtube. Was wondering what motor and ESC your running. Would you have had to trim the tail pulley down using the pollyquest belts? If so by chance did you inquire to how much there custom width belts are? Going to be doing this with a trex600cf I just picked up.

Thanks

Ryan

It FBL now and pretty much ready to install in a fuselage , no resent vids though.
The motor is a 1100Kv with a 10t pinion and the ESC is a 80 amp with a governer.
The belt came from polybelt.com and at the time I ordered them they didnot have the polyquest belts so I can't say. I never checked into their custom width belts as I don't think it was an option at the time .

Do you have any links to this polyquest belts and the cutom width belts?

What kind of flying do you intend on doing with your heli?

Refresh my memory...the stock Align XL belt is 6mm, right? If so, Stock Drive Products sells metric width XL belts

No 4.5mm wide but it has XL printed on it, that's what threw me.
The belt I'm running on my 700 is 6mm wide which I think is better in the long run as it is a godd bit longer then the 600's original belt.

Hmm, this might make the T550 stretch a bit, ummm, interesting.

Not really all you need to do is enlarge the drive pulleies .75mm on each side and your good to go.
You can do this real easy with a cordless drill clamped to the beach and a dremel tool with a cutoff wheel chucked up, oh and a steady hand.

I guess actually taking apart my JetRanger and examining the T550 belt setup is called for, lol. And getting the 700 boom and trimming/matching length up with I guess the Funkey .60-.90 fuselage length ranges for a good length.

Did you find a width of the Logo series belts? I'm wondering if one of those would work...although the one I saw so far was $40

Maybe I'll just convert back to TT, lol.

Well, I guess I need to wait for that 700 boom to arrive and see what's really needed

For a 700 size heli your measurement from the center of the main shaft to center of tailshaft is 910-940mm.
The Logo 600 belt is to short and a little pricey too.
If you go back to TT you will most likely have a hard time balancing the heli as it is tail heavy with all plastic parts and belt drive.
On my HK-600 to get it to the right length (930mm main to tail shaft) I had to cut off 49mm from the 700 tailboom and go with a 700XL belt. You will need longer tailboom braces to fly it in pod & boom as your 550 ones will interfear with the tail servo. I used some 4mm CF rods I had laying around at 560mm in length .
You also need to shorten the tail rotor servo push rod and solder a threaded coupler end (GreatPlanes #GPMQ 3831) onto the cut end. You may also need to add up to 20ozs. of lead weight to the very front of your frame , depending on what battery pack or packs you plan on using. This is why I use TWO 3000mah 6s packs in parallel for the added weight .

Yeah, I'm really trying to avoid going back to TT (vibe and weight). I'm getting a bit ahead of the game here as I need to measure out how the frame relationship to the tail is on the T550 and then mimicing an average 700 size heli from there.

Some more research is showing the Logos being some 6mm and 6.2mm wide thereabouts...wider than the Trex apparently.

Some promising catalog listings from this place:

http://beltcorp.thomasnet.com/catego...n-timing-belts

XL in .1875 (4.76mm) widths available. Even in steel-belted urethane! Need to get a mockup of the T550 going to pick a size and give them a call for a quote on a belt for it...

That would be the right width, however I don't think you would want a steel-belted one because of the added weight.
I found strength is not really the issue it is all about the weight.
Yes the Logo belts are much wider then the T-rex belts , it's almost like Align said what is th minimum we can get by with to drive this tail rotor when picking out a belt compared to other heli manufacturers.
I like having the wider belt , to me it just gives me a better feeling of security as it is much longer then the stock belt. You know at full spool-up it is just jumping around all over the place inside the tail boom , even if the tension is adjusted right.