velocity 50 links

[sparky2006]

hi all just building my new velocity 50, everything is going fine, i just need to know the best way to free the tight ball links as they are quite tight, also please could someone give me some info on there head setup ie lengh off rods etc i have set up the ball s as intermediate settings but unsure if the rod lenghs are right

thanks

[Swashbuckler]

Hi I built mine a few weeks ago and also found that the links were "extremely tight" <- understatement .

It is recommended that you let them bed in naturally, however I personally felt this was going to take too long for me, I was fitting an engine that was already run in and I wanted to give it a ragging straight away so I used a ball link reamer. Only half a turn in each link though as the reamer had 2 cutting points. If the reamer had 1 cutting point it would be a complete turn. This left the links tight like any other new link, so still some room to bed in. Had I needed to run the engine in I might not have bothered.

I used the aggressive settings for everything and found the link lengths quoted were close enough. I changed a few of them by a turn or 2 once I had blades on and set to zero degrees just so that the mixing and washout arms were also at or close to zero degrees.

Hope this helps.

Also make sure you put your fuel pipe/ clunk on the tank before you assemble the frame halves, because otherwise you are in for a whole load of shouting and screaming..... don't ask me how I know.

Have fun, it's the best 50 I have flown.

[sparky2006]

hi thanks for the reply, i have put the clunk in first, thank god!!!! i have used intermediate settings as i am not a 3 pilot just sport so hopefully that will be ok, with the links can you spin a ball in a drill slowly to ease the tight links? as i dont have a sizer. could you tell me what positions the arms have to be in at 0 pitch

thanks

[Swashbuckler]

As a sport pilot you don't need to get all particular about the position of mixing arms yet. I suspect you will be using a pitch range of about -5 to +11 so it won't be essential that everything is at zero when the blades are at zero. Just use their stated arm lengths. I would just make sure that the servo arms are at 90 degrees to the servo cases when the collective stick is in the middle (by moving the arms on the splines and some subtrim) and when they are set like that, the blades are at zero degrees.

As far as spinning a ball on a drill in the links I'm not so sure that it would work consistently, you could try it, there are spare links in the box. I think I'd be letting them bed in naturally in your situation, but I also understand your eagerness to sort it out as nobody will understand just how tight a link could be, unless they have built a velocity from the box.....

[Smoothound]

If the links really are that stiff I'd not want to even run in an engine allowing them to loosen naturally. Be like flying a sack of poop and really nasty for any sort of flying. I'd be loosening them in some form from the off.

The above really depends how stiff they really are though...