Our Pro-Drive
Electronic Blade Balancer

We got this thing in spring of 2004 when we had a major vibration problem.

The unit itself is very easy to operate and worked great.  After playing with the rotor system and seeing what a fine adjustment could do we just flat out can't imagine balancing the blades without having one unless we had several years of trial and error practice.

I couldn't handle using duct tape to attach this bracket to the ship during our test flights
so we made this nifty bracket thats we can hard mount on the ship.  It saves wear and tear on our paint and it's less likely to give false readings hard mounted like this when you don't have it on the ship just right and the beam misses the reflective tape it targets on the bottom of the rotorblade strap.

This is a shot of the forward pickup sensor that mounts on the pilots foot pedal stop

All wired up and ready to go.

Once you have the brackets made it takes about 20 minutes to install this thing and have it up and running.

If you want to see this thing in action check out these links

Our first time using this machine,
April 2004
Vibration_Problem

And Our Second and much easyer time
March 2005
Re_Balancing_Our Main_Rotor_Blades

This isn't part of the Pro-Drive Balancer unit but your going to need one, or something like it, to set the trailing edges of the main rotor blades.
Pro-Drive sells a much better unit for doing this procedure that makes this one look like a tinker toy. They also sell a reflex trailing edge bender, another tool that works better than anything I've seen.
If we could afford them we would have them but for now well have to get buy with what we have. 

We added these 2 port openings for running wires into the cabin next time we balance our ship.

I don't like having to tape all the wires to our paint job and if it's cold out we freeze because we can't have the doors on the ship.  We canibalized these neat little things from the inside door panels of some kind of a VW,maybe VW Jetta but I'm not sure.

Done 1/20/05

END