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Tail Rotor
Kewl! Kewl!
Did I mention how cool this thing is lol.
Everything
here too went by the book except that the end caps were different in
shape. There really wasn't anything we could do about it so we
nailed em in. Be sure to check everything twice before
drilling. We balanced the blades by riveting a small piece of
aluminum to the inside of one rotor blade cap, grinding it smaller
until the blades balanced.
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Don't forget to put a small hole in the caps to allow the grease and water to exit because the added weight would really mess up the balance.
The counter
weight bolts need something to keep them in so we locktited ours so
they wouldn't back out because there isn't any real way to safety
wire them.
The
tail rotor slider assembly is a trick to install and get correctly
lined up but once ya get it ya got it.
Before
you drill the
hole in the shaft for the pulley be sure to put a belt on it and to
place the tension tool in that little hole in the tail boom and
make sure it hits it square or you'll get bad tension readings
and it is
important to push the device straight in line with the belt.
Another thing to mention here would be that when you cut out the slot in the tail boom be sure to cut it forward enough to get the belts on. You have to do a trial run for fitting everything so be sure to do it. We cut our slot and installed the tail rotor assembly and then did the tail cone assembly.
Do Not do that until you've fitted the belts or you'll be redoing your tail cone assembly like we had to do.
Our forward cover didn't have enough room for the slider assembly to go forward enough to install the belts so we had to drag out the fiberglass and redo that piece. Sure glad we didn't have any of it painted yet.
When I
went to Rotorway for my Phase I Training
I learned
something about setting the tension on the belts. The book calls for
10 lbs tension on the belts cold but that isn't exactly how the folks
at Rotorway do it. The belts gain some 3 or 4 lbs of tension when
they get hot so what they do out there is set them at about 6 to 7
lbs cold and when they heat up the tension rises to just under 10
lbs. My understanding of it is not to let the belts exceed 10 lbs
tension. During the pre flights we did, as long as the tension was at
5 to 7 lbs we we're good to go. Later after I started flying on my
own I used this method and found it to work great. At Homers fly in
back in July 2001 its was a nice toasty average temp of 87 to 92
degrees. My tail rotor tension was set at 10 lb cold. After
hovering and flying around the field the last afternoon on the post
flight check I found my ship had blown a 180 temp dot on the rear
pulley. It was time to load the ship up into the trailer for the next
days trip to Mentone so we boxed her up figuring we'd deal with it
when we got there. After talking with Homer about it, we decided to
reset the tension and replace the temp dot and see what happened. At
Mentone we did just that and all was right with the world. What I
learned from this experiences was to
never
let the tension
exceed the 10 lb limit or I'd have high bearing temps.
In early 2002 RotorWay had a crash in one of the factory ships
and from what we understand they found the tail rotor belts on the ship involved to be improperly installed causing tail rotor failure. Shortly there after April 4, 2002, this Bulletin M-20 was sent out to owners. Its pretty hard to imagine folks at the factory installing the belts improperly but I guess it happens
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