Chromed and Painted Parts

This section and pictures should be a big help to builders.

We had no idea what would get what until we finished the ship and disassembled it placing the parts we wanted painted and the parts we wanted chromed in different piles.

I really don't see how anyone could build this ship powder coated or painted

without leaving alot of nicked up parts. We had to trim and grind all of the parts you see in these pictures at least once and most of them several times before it was over.  There are also several places on the air frame that are ground on or notched out that would need to have some major touch up done if it was coated first. A good example of this would be the brackets on the airframe that hold up the bottom of the fuel tanks.  There is a major recess that has to be cut into it so the fuel lines will have enough clearence.

We couldn't get our main collective assembly chromed

because of that peice of metal on the rear of it.

If it's dipped in the chroming process it will be destroyed.

What we ended up doing is putting a peice of chrome mylar on it to make it appear that it had been chromed.

We had our rear ballast mount chromed
and in hindsight wished we wouldn't have because of that structural situation the chroming process causes.

If it were to break off,
the ship would do an immediate nose dive
so were not real comfertable about having it chromed.

A fellow was passing by our home one day and saw our ship sitting in our glass garage.

In mid stride he bowed up his car in the middle of the road. That wasn't much of a surprise to us because we get alot of that lol.  After he sat there staring a couple of minutes he parked his car and came on in.

He was pretty amazed to see a helicopter in a house in the middle of a city neighborhood lol.  Well after we got through all the formalities it came out that he worked for a company in Morristown, Tessessee, that made pistons and cylinders for aircraft engine manufacturers like Lycoming.

 I told him I'd heard about chromed cylinders in aircraft engines and asked him how can you could chrome a piston cylinder and not the structural parts on a helicopter like swingarms and landing gear?

He said that if you baked the parts within 24 or 48 hours of the chroming process at something like 350 degrees for a few hours in an oven they will retain their strength.

His explanation for that was that the metal gets full of hydrogen "or some big word" during the chroming process and that's what weakens the metal.

Baking it shortly after it is chromed allows the hydrogen "or some big word" to escape through the chrome thus restoring the steel to it's original state or close to it or perhaps even better. I don't remember all he said because it went on and on way over my head.

Check this information out before relying on it

because it seems to me that RotorWay would be up on this and put it in the building information but then again they forget to add in and point out alot of stuff in the builder manuals. 

These are the parts resorted after they came back from the chroming process

END