Death of a TriCopter
Sad news today. My beloved TriCopter bit the dust.
I write this story as a warning - don't trust second hand Receivers.
I needed a new 36Mhz RX, and I so scanned eBay and found an R700 - and as the description stated - it had 2 flights under its belt. So I thought... "Great - Just what I need" When it arrived I put it on the TriCopter and things went downhill from there. The first thing that I notices is that the Gyros would not arm - no matter what I did, I just could not get the Gyros to sense the gain from the TX. So I changed them to the Throttle channel (as you can with TriCopters) and things went CRAZY!!
After some trial and error, and a trip to the Hobby Shop, we figured out that the RX was buggered. There was NO output on the GEAR channel, and it was mixing AIL with Throttle. How crazy is that!! On top of this, my servo that controls YAW on the rear motor, was dead. GRRR!! Now I was angry!!
I had no choice but to buy a new RS70 for near on $90 and head home. I put it the new RX into the Tri and it "appeared" to be working. The trouble wasn't over though. I had to set the gain on the Gyros ALL the way to 150 just to get it stable enough for a hover. So again - I was left scratching my head.
So I decided to put the AR6200 back on, to see if it was the radio mix, or the Copter itself. This is when I started to realise that the dodgy RX that I purchased off eBay had affected the electronics on board my bird, for the DX7 also needed the Gains turned up to 150 (the limit) just to get it to hover stable.
I decided to take it out to the paddock and give it a good run. That was the fatal decision. I was hovering around a little, and it felt a little "washy", but I pushed on, none the less. I was doing some figure-8 patters and then put the copter into a spin - and it happened. Something obviously freaked out and half way through the spin, it leaned over on its side, and as I tried to gas it to gain some height, it kept rolling over. I had no choice but to cut the throttle and watch it go in!
So here endeth the lesson. Only new RXs for me from now on.
Oh well - time to rebuild!!
Cheers
The Mongrel
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