Take 2…
Posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 12:01 pm by Jeff HoyI finally received all the replacement parts for my Axe CPv3 to get her flying again. Putting it back together was actually pretty easy. The only troubling parts were getting the O-rings stuffed back in the the center hub and making sure the main blades and fly-bar were tracking properly. Getting a helicopter properly setup from the beginning is the key to it flying nice. It only took me about an hour or so to fix everything.
So with my helicopter ready to fly again I grabbed my transmitter and headed out to my large driveway. I got it “light” on it’s skids to check all my trims and make sure it didn’t want to do too much dancing around. Confident that I had it where it should be I applied a little more throttle and got it up about four feet off the ground and hovered it nicely for about 30 seconds. I then landed it somewhat smoothly. I was pretty pumped about executing my first real take-off and landing. So after that accomplishment I decided to take it easy for the rest of the time and just stay light on the skids to practice maneuvering. It was going pretty well as I was walking my heli around, keeping decent control over it.
But then…
While practicing some sideways movements the training skids caught on something and over she went. Blades striking hard against the ground before I could power down, pieces of plastic flying in every direction. I panicked less this time than I did last, but that didn’t save me. I have yet to do a full inspection but besides the main blades being trashed it looks like I’ve broken both blade grips, lost a linkage, and shattered the tail rotor into a million pieces.
The total cost for repairs on the first crash was $27.66. This second one will be around $30 again. $30 per flight… I don’t know how long I can keep this up.
