29 March 2007

Night Ranger Intro & mod's


Well we decided to get hold of a remote control helicopter for the lab and after much debate ended up with the electric night ranger by Venom Air Corp . Theses little beast's have a single highspeed engine and two micro servos as well as gyro assisted flight and to boot no explosive LIPO batteries to go boom. This little guy runs on a custom nimh cells running at 8.4 volts or 7 1.2 aaa cells i guessing, as its wrapped in black shrink wrap.
The set is "ready" to fly with just a few basic things to do, assuming you know how to fly (we dont).
The power cell needs to be charged and the controller needs AA cells, eight in fact. But these were in the box, (nice venom green branded ones too).
Their is a heap of diffrent blade decals and we advise you use the main rotor stickers as they actually help to keep the blades from getting damaged, we chipped a blade on a cardboard box of all things and the stickers and a bit of black electrical tape had us up and running in no time at all.



The Next thing to do is read the book while the cell is charging, and watch the video of why you need more area then this to fly in ! We have replaced the tail rotor retaining grommet with a piece of longer silicon hose to hold on better and reduce the chance of loosing it. We also resoldered and taped ver the tail rotor motor as we snapped off both cables flying around the back yard and smashing into a window at night ! whichi is why theres no video.
I also built a training frame and removed all the chassis stickers to clean up the look, lees toy, more drone. The last thing we did was to reroute the aerial around the tail of the helicopter to reduce damage and increase the amount of unwund wire. The aerial was getting frayed wrapped around the skids.
We are having hassles getting stable flight so the whole chassis needs to be rebuilt and centered better, this is a matter of undoing the carbon rods that make up the moat of the frames and resetting them with new silicon tube with more of it. We also managed to snap a skid on a hard landing which is now taped and glued so is working fine, but plans are in place to rebuild them (the skids) in carbon fibre square rod like the trainer frame, and i'll most likely build the frame into it as well saving more weight, and balancing it up easier.
ore on the chopper as we learn to fly, then add our 2.4ghz micro cam to the underside for some onboard crashes. i mean flights.