I’ve been flying quite a bit and not paying much attention to the load I’ve been putting on my speed controller. Today I plugged my CC50 ICE into the computer to check out my last few flights. I was quite surprised. Most of my flying did not load the ESC as much as I had expected. While I had a few high spikes on current and wattage, overall my flights were pretty average.  I’ve mostly been practicing flips and inverted hovering, and most things I attempt do not qualify as hardcore 3D. I’m slowly getting there though.

My inverted hovering skills have been honed over a few flights.  The majority of it was done during one evening where I attempted it for the first time and then flew 3 more battery packs over the evening.  You can see this in the video of my first inverted hover attempts below.

So I’ve been working on those but I’ve also just been screwing around.  The log chart below is based on a flight where I was flying fast forward and then did a hard breaking maneuver by the following: Fast forward flight, rotate the heli 90 degrees(nose to the sky) and then applying high collective.  This spiked the power readings on the ice as you can see, pulling out a large amount of current. Just click on it to see a full size version.

When I did that I pulled the current up to around 50 amps on the ESC, which is within it’s >peak< rating by quite a bit. I have another flight on which I screwed up and I did a recovery, highly loading the rotor disc and you can see that chart below.  Again, just click it for a larger version

You can see in the above graph that I pulled nearly 60.3 amps,, again well within the limits.

Basically by analyzing the information from my speed controller I have a better idea of how my flying is affecting my system, and as well I know I’m well within the systems limits.  Chance of an electrical failure due to my flying abilities is pretty low!  Carry on!

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Yesterday I began the process of learning to hover my RC helicopter inverted and made a video of the good parts of the 4 flights. I’ve been getting a lot more flying in lately with my Ace R/C Mini-Titan.

About a month ago I was flying a bit late and lost orientation of the heli and put it in. You’ll probably see lights on the heli here and there in the video, but I’ll make another post on those. The lights do help a lot when the sun goes down and it’s hard to get perspective.

The video below shows my progress with inverted hovering over four flights.  I have practiced this only for about 10 minutes on my Phoenix R/C flight simulator, but the sim just never feels right compared to the real thing, so I just decided to practice with the real thing.  The first and second flights are pretty rough but you can see a slow improvement over the duration of the video clip.  My goal is to be able to hover a complete flight (4:30 minutes) inverted.

My accumulated RC heli experience before attempting this is quite a few years of semi-sedate stuff. I’m competent with hovering, fast forward flight. I’m comfortable flipping the heli forwards and backwards, as well as side to side. I’ve rolled the heli while pulling up into a vertical climb (kind of like a stall climb with a plane) and while not totally comfortable with it I can hover nose in alright.

Last week I spent about an hour practicing inverted blow-outs where I flipped the heli and hammered negative collective to push the heli up into the air to try and get a feel for the collective when inverted and the responsiveness, as well as trying to remember the right way to punch the collective when inverted.

Overall I would say in less than 20 minutes of flying (4:30 minutes x 4 flights) I’ve made quite an improvement on inverted hovering.  There is plenty of room for improvement of course, but I think at this rate it will come quickly. The biggest part of learning new skills when flying models, and in fact doing most things is to find the time to put into actually flying or doing those things.

Once I get good at hovering inverted nose in, then I will spend some time working on hover inverted nose out as well.  Hopefully in a couple of months I’ll feel comfortable in all positions of upright and inverted.

The video is uploading right now, and I’m about to go test out my new FPV Glider. I’ve set this post to auto-post at about the time the video is complete.

Update: The video is here or embedded below

Feel free to share below if you’ve recently been trying out some new moves with your RC heli or airplane.

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I recorded the pack current and volts on my ACE Mini-Titan R/C Helicopter using an Eagle Tree flight data recorder V3 with my new setup. I had some awesome flights with flips and rolls and high G-force turns mixed in while flying with Ollie on Saturday.

The new setup uses metal mixing arms, green paddles, a Scorpion HK-2221-8 brushless motor, Castle Creations Phoenix-45 and a 13 tooth pinion.  The current draw looks pretty reasonable, on the high power climb outs you can see a large spike up to as high as 44 amps.

This helicopter climbs like crazy with this setup, very very fast!  The current is about 10 amps below the peak of the batteries capabilities though so I’m glad it stopped there.  Going too much further would probably result in LiPo (Lithium-Polymer) puffing!  The batteries are rated at 25C discharge and the pack is 2200mAh or 2.2 Amp hours.  with the 25C rating this is 25 * 2.2 which turns out to be 55 amps.

Anyways, check out the results from the flight data recorder in the gallery below.  The voltage is the green line and the numbers on the right, and the current is the purple line and the numbers on the left(in amps).

As always, if you have any questions please use the contact links on this website, they’re fairly visible.  As for the photos click on the photo and use the left/right arrows on the bottom right of the image to navigate through the slides. AND as always, thank you for your support, it makes this site possible!

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I completed the upgrades to my Mini-Titan e325 radio controlled helicopter this week, they came in on Wednesday and I had them done and/or installed by Thursday.  The parts I ordered can be seen in this previous post

The HK-2221-8 from Scorpion Motors was easy to install, it comes with some proprietary pin-type connector for the motor.  You can either desolder these and put your own on or use the included female connectors that are often included with electronic speed controllers.   These connectors seem to be decent quality.  The female connectors have a spring around the fingers to pull them tight onto the male pins, keeping everything secure.  They solder on just like your standard ‘bullet’ type connectors.

I mounted the pinion onto the motors output shaft using blue Loctite paste.  The Loctite paste comes in a tube, sort of like school glue, and it is a lot cleaner to deal with. You should make sure to push it into the threads of the screw or nut as it’s not a free flowing liquid and isn’t of too much use if it just sits on the surface.   I know that a lot of people are fond of the red Loctite for this task, but I really hate having to heat the motor shaft to pull a pinion, and the blue has worked out well for me.  I lined the pinion up relative to the old pinion’s position on the stock motor shaft and then cranked the grub screw down nice and tight.

The small size of the electronic speed controller from Castle Creations was a bit of a surprise for me.  I had forgotten how efficient they are with the size of their products.   The stock 40 Amp ESC that came with the Mini-Titan is at least twice the size of the new CC Phoenix 45 Amp speed control.   Prep was pretty much the same as any brushless motor speed control.  Trim the wires to fit your setup.  (Hint: Estimate the length you need, then add 1/2 to 1 inch to allow for bends, etc) solder on the deans and female pin connectors and we’re off!

I had ordered the metal washout block, fly bar control arms,  and the metal mixing levers to install.  Unfortunately I was not able into install the mixing levers because the stock ACE plastic flybar cage interferes with the metal levers (or the other way around).   This means I would need to order a new metal fly bar cage but  I’m going to hold off on that for now.  I want to leave some plastic components in the head as ‘break points’ so the expensive metal bits have less chance of being destroyed in a crash.

The washout and the fly bar control arms were very easy to install.  I already had a metal headblock installed.   I disconnected all the links and removed the head block from the main shaft, then I installed the washout block/control arm assembly down onto the shaft and reinstalled the headblock securely.   Pretty easy!

Bryn was kind enough to take some pictures for me of my slightly upgraded Minit-Titan e325 you can see some additional ones below

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I’m patiently awaiting for the arrival of some new parts for my Mini-Titan. I wasn’t very happy with the plastic control arms on the rotor head that came with the kit, they tend to flex under load. I’m already running an ACE metal CNC head block on the helicopter, so I’m doing a partial upgrade on it.  I also ordered a metal CNC washout base as well.

I also ordered a new motor and speed controller. The primary reason for ordering the motor was that I think one of my bearings on the stock ACE red motor is going out and I figured I might as well get something decent.   I ordered a new speed controller because I don’t like the setup on the stock one too much.   The stock controller and motor will get used in a less critical application, I’m not sure where, yet, but I have some ideas.

The Scorpion motors come well recommended and well reviewed. With the HK-2221-8 being what most people use in a Mini-Titan if they go with a Scorpion, and the HK-2221-6 providing extreme performance with the cost of possible excessive parts wear.  Even on ‘high end’ helis it can cause excessive wear.

And to finish of my binge purchase of heli stuff I bought a set of green paddles.  In reality I’ve seen people fly the heck out of a stock Mini-Titan, far greater than my abilities allow, so I doubt I’ll ever have to upgrade beyond this for quite a while.

I bought all of the parts through HeliProz, due to past good experiences.  You may be able to save a few bucks shopping elsewhere, there are many dealers for these kind of helicopters, parts, supplies and other things out there.  Don’t forget to consider shipping costs when buying parts.   Buying through 5 different companies to save on parts may end up costing you more in the end once you calculate in the shipping costs.

Shopping List:
(links open in new windows / tabs)

Motor:  Scorpion HK-2221-8
Speed Controller: Castle Creations Phoenix-45
Pinion Gears: Ace PV0729 13-Tooth
Metal Flybar Control Levers: Ace PV0807
Metal Mixing Levers: Ace PV0805
Metal Washout Base: Ace PV0808
Paddles: Ace PV0837

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I mowed the lawn and got a couple flights in with the Mini-Titan helicopter.  It’s a great little heli, though there’s not a lot of room in the yard, yet, to get really crazy with it, I just buzz around over the back yard.   There’s an R/C club a few miles away I might join, if they don’t mind helicopters.  A lot of places don’t like these ‘dagblasted whirly birds’ flying around their airplanes

As you can see in the pic of the other side yard, it hasn’t been taken care of yet, I’ll probably work on raking out the dead wild violet roots, filling in the holes and sunken spots this week evenings and put some grass seed down.   I’ve started to cut back on watering of the peninsula lawn, I want to force the grass to start extending it’s roots down into the soil so that it will hopefully be decently established by the time our smoldering summer comes along.

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