Blue Ray 450 PE Rebuild

[Mustang Fever]

I got this in September of 09, and hovered it a lot during that winter. In the Spring, I started flying it around the club field, got it too far away, got disoriented, and augured it in.

I put it on the shelf, having decided I needed something bigger and easier to see to learn on. I ended up with a T Rex 700E F3C. My son has since gotten into helis, and needs something a little bigger that his Horizon Hobby machines, so I'm putting the Blue Ray back together for him.

I'm going to get the following parts for it:

T Rex 450 SE V2 blades, T/R blades, canopy, main drive gear assembly, and a DS420 tail servo. I'm replacing the entire head, swashplate and main shaft assembly with the Airy unit. The original motor, servos and ESC are in good shape, but I like the governor and data logging feature of the ICE ESCs so much that I'm getting a Castle ICE 50 for it.

As mentioned elsewhere in these forums, the 450 PE gyro is garbage. I got a Quark for it.

I really learned a lot by building the T Rex and watching a lot of the Finless videos. I'm kind of appalled at all the items I found wrong with the setup of the 450. It's gonna fly nice, this time.

[Mustang Fever]

Helipal must have been out of stock on one or more of the ordered items, cause they didn't ship until about two weeks ago. Anyway, the stuff got here today and I'm putting the BR 450 back together.

The Airy head assembly seems well made, but you can't trust the assembly- they didn't use enough loctite, and some of the swash balls were not tightened properly, so I'm pulling one bolt at a time from the whole thing and re loctiting.

Got the swash perfectly level all the way up and all the way down, using the aluminum tool.

Set the governor on the ICE 50 to 2300 rpm, and made all the other required entries using the Castle Link.

Got the Spartan Quark gyro all installed and programmed for the DS 420 digital servo.

Forgot to order the autorotation bushing. Got one coming from heliproz.

[Mustang Fever]

The Airy head turned out to be a POS. I was able to use the swashplate and the main shaft, along with the flybar. The rest of it I threw in a box. I bought some new blade grips, a feathering shaft and bearings for the original head, and put it all back together. All those were in stock as Blue Ray 450 parts at xheli.com

Had to get a new motor- turns out the original had spun the upper bearing and it hogged out the bell. Got an Align 450M.

Got it in the air this morning, and made quite a few flights during the day, in some fairly strong gusty winds. She handled real well. I'm very impressed with the Spartan Quark gyro. Went through the programming once, and it works great with no tail wag. I can't say that about the Align gyros. Seem to be a big pain, requiring lots of experimenting and playing about before they work right.

Stability was helped a lot by locating the pack to the aluminum bottom plate, just in front of the motor. This bird likes to balance a bit nose down, so that was a good place for it.

The CC ICE 50 turned out to be a good choice, as I was able to experiment with head speeds until I found the sweet spot for this bird. (Somewhere around 2750 on the governor)

I think I want to build one for myself, now. I've got my eye on the FBL version.