Oh my Gords!

OK, fitting the bits

 I have a JGF 400DH brushless motor, a Sonix 30A ESC and a Hitec Electron 6 channel receiver.

I had been delaying the fitment of these items mainly because I thought it was going to be difficult and I didn’t know what I was doing. In the end it was all rather easy!

The motor
The pinion was half on, but not set right to mesh correctly with the main gear. So, first things first, I removed the old motor. Very easy to do using a long-ish screwdriver passed up through the landing skids and frame.

This is not recommended - but I positioned the pinion using gentle but firm taps with a hammer onto the pinion. The motor shaft is flush with the rear of the case, so with extreme care this method worked. A more suitable method is to use a vice or a G-clamp.

To position the motor correctly, I placed a piece of paper between the pinion and the main gear and then pushed the motor against the main gear. Once the screws were tight, I rotated the main gear to extract the paper. This means that the pinion meshes nicely but does not push hard into the main gear’s teeth.

The Receiver
The Electron is slightly smaller than the stock ESky receiver, so fitting it was not a problem. the only slight issue is that the connectors are on the top rather than the end. I fitted all the connectors first, then I positioned the receiver with a sticky pad and reinforced the mounting with 2 zip ties.

The ESC
The Sonix ESC also has a BEC attached as a separate item which made it slightly moer interesting, trying to position everything. I have a slight advantage in that I have a Trex canopy which gives me more “nose” space. The ESC was attached where the original one was and the BEC was attached underneath the main frame.

Finally
To finish off, all wires were zip tied to the frame, in a number of places, to ensure the couldn’t move. Below are pictures of the end result

I had the opportunity to buy an “as new” ESky 0704A head Lock Gyro and it arrived today. Below is a summary of how I fitted it.

First of all, remove the standard gyro and clean off any sticky stuff left behind.


Next fix the 0704A gyro to the helicopter. The blue face of the gyro points towards the tail, the attached wires exit from the top-right and the servo connection is top-left, when viewing from the rear of the helicopter. I used 2 sticky pads to fix the gyro to the platform vacated by the previous gyro and to the servos.

Connect the servo cable to the gyro with the black wire at the top.
Connect the 3 pin connector from the gyro to the channel 4 connector, orange wire at the top.
Connect the single orange wire from the gyro to the channel 5 connector, again, orange wire to the top.

Now it is time to bench test the installation. Turn on the transmitter and check/zero trims as usual. Ensure that the gyro switch is up / away from you (this is the standard, non head hold, mode).

Connect the helicopter battery and wait for the flashing red light to go blue and the tail servo to initialise. If it doesn’t, then recheck the gyro connections.

Check that all functions still work (right stick all directions), then check that the rudder (left stick left/right) operates correctly.

Enable the head hold function by flicking the gyro switch down / towards you. The tail servo should stay where it is. If it creeps either way, then turn off head hold mode and adjust the rudder trim until enabling head hold mode does not cause the servo to creep.

To check head hold mode is working, rotate the helicopter left and right - you should see the tail servo react.

Once you are happy that it’s working OK, tidy up the cables by fixing them to the frame with tie wraps (or your own preferred method).

The helicopter is ready for flying