About ready to throw in the towel on this thing

[BermyMan]

Alright, really scratching my head on this one. After so many good reviews, figured I wanted a new toy so bought myself a Protos 500 which I tried to maiden a couple of weeks back, barely managed to get it back safely on the ground - everything checked out on the ground fine, but as soon as it raised up off the skids all hell broke loose, almost totally uncontrollable, wobbling in every direction, sudden jumps in altitude up and down - scary stuff. So brought it home, rechecked everything, didn't find anything really wrong with it, but figured maybe the gyro(align GP780) didn't like the placement on the tail boom housing(have had issues with other 500 helis), so swapped the gyro and receiver around, re-wired everything from scratch, again checked swash level, pitch and elevator movement, etc .. all pretty normal stuff and everything looked fine. Back out to the field yesterday, spun it up till just light on the skids, everything looking stable and no issues I could see, head speed seems decent, so take off and same nonsense as before - so unstable as to be out of control .. got it down but cost me the rear paddles in the long grass(couldn't even get it back to the landing area it was so bad)

So about ready to give up and chalk it up as a dud/bad experience unless someone has any insight I may be missing?? Only other option I was considering was to convert it over to flybarless(AR7200BX) to eliminate the head and receiver as potential issue, but really loath to throw good money after bad at this point ..

Any ideas appreciated ..

PS - Other info
- First attempt I had the belt at the tightness manual suggested as optimal, but in case that was too loose, tightened it up substantially the second time round in case that was the issue, made no difference so don't think that is it ..
- Main blades are balanced within 0.1 of a gram
- Sprektrum DX8, used by all my other models as well
- Tail is as smooth as I can get it, definitely not butter but I've had worse, and have a regular size servo there for extra torque just in case(hate that tail design as an aside!)
- Running cheap servos but have used the same ones in other model(TREX500) without any issue. D50012MG Tail, HKS-D9257 Cyclic.

[seth1846]

Originally Posted by BermyMan

Alright, really scratching my head on this one. After so many good reviews, figured I wanted a new toy so bought myself a Protos 500 which I tried to maiden a couple of weeks back, barely managed to get it back safely on the ground - everything checked out on the ground fine, but as soon as it raised up off the skids all hell broke loose, almost totally uncontrollable, wobbling in every direction, sudden jumps in altitude up and down - scary stuff. So brought it home, rechecked everything, didn't find anything really wrong with it, but figured maybe the gyro(align GP780) didn't like the placement on the tail boom housing(have had issues with other 500 helis), so swapped the gyro and receiver around, re-wired everything from scratch, again checked swash level, pitch and elevator movement, etc .. all pretty normal stuff and everything looked fine. Back out to the field yesterday, spun it up till just light on the skids, everything looking stable and no issues I could see, head speed seems decent, so take off and same nonsense as before - so unstable as to be out of control .. got it down but cost me the rear paddles in the long grass(couldn't even get it back to the landing area it was so bad)

So about ready to give up and chalk it up as a dud/bad experience unless someone has any insight I may be missing?? Only other option I was considering was to convert it over to flybarless(AR7200BX) to eliminate the head and receiver as potential issue, but really loath to throw good money after bad at this point ..

Any ideas appreciated ..

PS - Other info
- First attempt I had the belt at the tightness manual suggested as optimal, but in case that was too loose, tightened it up substantially the second time round in case that was the issue, made no difference so don't think that is it ..
- Main blades are balanced within 0.1 of a gram
- Sprektrum DX8, used by all my other models as well
- Tail is as smooth as I can get it, definitely not butter but I've had worse, and have a regular size servo there for extra torque just in case(hate that tail design as an aside!)
- Running cheap servos but have used the same ones in other model(TREX500) without any issue. D50012MG Tail, HKS-D9257 Cyclic.

Just a thought, what BEC are you running? Is there a chance your system on this bird is possibly close to or even exceeding your becs specs?
Just thinking voltage/current spikes and drops could cause servos to have the jitters and then also not have the power to respond correctly to your control inputs.
ON the giving up... NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER EVER EVER GIVE UP, as mister Churchhill stated!! lol

You will love this bird once she's good to go, also the AR7200bx is a nice choice on this bird, I have this setup with 9650s on cyclics and savox 1290mg on the tail, with a Kontronic 60HV+ soon to be the new power source!! Had the YGE burn up on me sadly, and found a sweet deal on the Kon! She's been very well behaved with the beast for me!!

[dr dremel]

I had an Align GP780 shortly on my bird (boom mount) directly after I built it. It flew pretty much perfectly for what I wanted (confirm the machanics are ok) on maiden.

When you say whobbling did the blades go out of track? What head speed are you running? And what blades? Mine didn´t like cheap GfK ones at all, balanced or not.

I also caught myself installing one paddle backwards. Head is built up correctly? Maybe shoot a pic.

Have you tested your servos under load? Maybe one or more are missing a tooth.

Another thing could be vibes after take off triggering a faulty servo connection.

I built mine up as a flybar but judging from my Mini Protos it is just more convenient and gives you more consistent control behavior when you go FBL. That being said I would try to sort the problems before doing that. That´s of course only if you didn´t want to convert it anyways

[BermyMan]

Originally Posted by seth1846

Just a thought, what BEC are you running? Is there a chance your system on this bird is possibly close to or even exceeding your becs specs?
Just thinking voltage/current spikes and drops could cause servos to have the jitters and then also not have the power to respond correctly to your control inputs.
ON the giving up... NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER EVER EVER GIVE UP, as mister Churchhill stated!! lol

You will love this bird once she's good to go, also the AR7200bx is a nice choice on this bird, I have this setup with 9650s on cyclics and savox 1290mg on the tail, with a Kontronic 60HV+ soon to be the new power source!! Had the YGE burn up on me sadly, and found a sweet deal on the Kon! She's been very well behaved with the beast for me!!

Thanks for the reply. I'm using the YGE 60A ESC that was provided with the combo kit, not running a separate BEC at the moment. If under-powered then maybe will try a larger one and see if I get different results, would have hoped they would include an ESC capable of running the bird properly though .. In any case I do have a spare 80A YEP ESC w/6A BEC around here somewhere, so that would definitely rule out power issue if I switch it over ..

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll keep plugging away at this thing til it bends to my will(one way or the other )

[BermyMan]

Originally Posted by dr dremel

I had an Align GP780 shortly on my bird (boom mount) directly after I built it. It flew pretty much perfectly for what I wanted (confirm the machanics are ok) on maiden.

When you say whobbling did the blades go out of track? What head speed are you running? And what blades? Mine didn´t like cheap GfK ones at all, balanced or not.

I also caught myself installing one paddle backwards. Head is built up correctly? Maybe shoot a pic.

Have you tested your servos under load? Maybe one or more are missing a tooth.

Another thing could be vibes after take off triggering a faulty servo connection.

I built mine up as a flybar but judging from my Mini Protos it is just more convenient and gives you more consistent control behavior when you go FBL. That being said I would try to sort the problems before doing that. That´s of course only if you didn´t want to convert it anyways

Thanks for the reply. To be honest never got as far as being able to check the tracking once in the air due to the extreme volatility at that point and just trying to save it. When light on the skids it appears good though. The wobbling is like a spinning top as it slows down, just before it runs out of steam and falls over(aging myself here, yes I played with tops as a kid). I haven't done the calculation on head speed, but using supplied Scorpion motor at 100% so should be good there, and from experience with other helis looks good too. Servos are all new so possibly a bad one in there, will definitely check under load and see if anything shows up there, good idea. Paddles are correct, have done the backwards thing myself before though, easy mistake to make. Am beginning to wonder about the head assembly myself, have been over it a couple of times and compared it to the manual and other FB helis I have, and "looks" OK, but quite possible I've messed up something there, will take yet another look at that as well ..

Thanks for the ideas!

[pscm]

I just recently built one and am a total newb. I do have mine set up as FBL though wanted to share a couple of things I discovered. First time up head speed was way to low and made it unstable. After getting a yep esc, thought I had the gov store setup correctly. Headspeed was to the moon and made it very scary to fly and quite hyper on the controls. Not sure of your experience level though this should be a very stable bird. What is unstable...the tail, pitch, both. As stated pics would help.

[Twill]

Is you pitch setup right? What's the max pitch you can get at full stick?

[9sec240]

Do you run expo? Are you using the weights in the paddles? What do you have your collective and cyclic pitch set to? What tooth pinion are you running?

[TitaniumFreak]

did you ground the boom ? I tried running mine without it and mine would shoot downward and blow the tail out and or it would act unpredictable with small twitches . never again . I do all the recommendations set out for the protos for a enjoyable fly. after I had a firm ground those issues never appeared again .