jjones Senior Heliman Location: Pendleton, Oregon
| 1. Adjustment wise I would leave them all at factory settings as in the manual. I have moved my to other locations like in the bell-hiller mixes, but as a beginner they are fine as in the manual.
I would then turn on exponential and bump up the elevator and aileron to about 40-50% to smooth everything out. I would also bump up your rudder expo to about 20% as well for a bit of desensatizing around neutral. These are very smooth machines and I can let go of the sticks for about 10 seconds on a nice calm day.
2. I would not worry about the thrust bearings. Just get the standard ones. Not really an issue as a beginner or even intermediate pilot.
3. Lubricate what it says in the manual while building. Once built, I have oil I use a few drops on certain parts and I use teflon spray on all other little parts like ball links, etc. Remember the bearings are packed with grease, don't blow the lub out of them with a spray. I lub it before every day of flying as they don't get soaked up like nitro helicopters.
4. I have the short one, I run 700 and 105 on the tail and they are close... The nice thing about bergens is the torque tube is a 3.00 dollar arrow shaft and the boom is only 10 bucks or so... So upgrade or not, it really doesn't matter. It's cheap either way. I can't remember the exact arrow size, but I took the bearing in and found the exact arrow size for it. Now I have about 6 torque tubes just waiting to be used!!!
5. The last thing I have learned from experience is that you need a fairly strong servo on the tail. Mine was butter smooth and still needed a strong servo. I sacrifice servo speed for torque any day. I can deal with a twitch in flight, but a lockout will cost me dollars.
Also, the recommended upgrades are the tail transmission upgrade and possibly the elevator upgrade, but it's not as necessary as the tail upgrade. If you like to autorotate, I suggest the constant gear. I don't have one and my gasser has a stopped tail rotor at 40-50 feet off the ground. It looks bizarre to have my tail blades just sitting there and not spinning. By the way, this is because there is hardly any friction in my tail system.
Josh Jones
Pendleton Oregon |