Measuring for our new Pro-Drive Secondary Unit

November 1, 2004

Here we go on our first step of obtaining our new secondary from Pro-Drive

After a short chat with John on the phone he sent us this neat little form via email to fill out and return to him.

It's a pretty simple thing to accomplish.  All you do is take these two simple measurments, note which way the little black arrow is pointing and fill in the blanks and your finished.

Beings that we view this as such a critical situation we purchased a new tool for the task,
a Macklanburg-Duncan Digital Protractor "Pro 360".  It would appear that Sears has a monopoly on this product as far as after market sales go because we couldn't find it available from any other source.  The unit wasn't cheap, it cost us a whopping $242.00 dollars by the time the tax and freight was added onto it.  It's my understanding that RotorWay now sends these out as part of the kit when you order your new ship.  The one Rotorway sends you has RotorWay stamped on it and aside from that I'm pretty sure from what I've been told it's the same identical unit.  Anyhow all in all at first glance it's a pretty complicated little bugger but after we read the instructions and played with it for a few minutes, including calibrating it, we was good to go.

Anticipating the arrival of the digital protractor
we already had the ship setup and ready to go as far as the main shaft being level both fore and aft as well as latterally so we could be sure and get the most accurate measurement of our frame cross tube.

Our goal in leveling the ship was to eliminate the possibility of making an error, as much as possible.  As you can see in the pictures above the new device is right on the money, well that or I just got lucky with my old bubble protractor level lol.

Now since we bought this nifty device, leveling the ship fore and aft or latterly wasn't a necessity because it has a special mode called "Alternate 0".  What that means is that with the touch of a button you can get a reference point of 0.0 whether what your measuring is level or not.  It's a pretty neat device but this being my first time using it, and the fact that I'm old and just didn't trust the dang thing, I went ahead and levelled the ship anyways lol.

First we set the unit on the Main Rotor Sprocket and turned it on and let it stabilize.  Next we pushed the "ALT 0"  Button and the unit once again after it stabilized and gave us the 0.0 reading we were looking for.

Next!

With the top of the unit facing aft the arrow showed the direction of the angle to be forward.

With the bottom of the unit facing aft the arrow showed the direction of the angle to be aft.

The next step was taking the measurment of the square drive cross tube itself.

We placed the unit in the center of the cross tube in a level up and down position and waited around 3 seconds or so and it gave us an angle of 89.2 degrees.  Next just to see what would happened we flipped the unit over and once again after about 3 seconds it stabilized and gave us the same reading of 89.2 degrees.

We entered the information on the Pro-Drive form and emailed back to John along with these pictures and at that point this step and this little chapter was a done deal.

That's where we were as of 11/1/04

END