Torii Story Continues

Assalamu'alaikum.

In parallel with fixing and flying HBK2, I still continue to maintain my Torii as well. Yes, no way I am going to just put it aside.

[4-Jun-2009 Thursday]

Well, before I went back to my home town in Kelantan, I did a quick flight for Torii to make sure the engine (and other parts as well) are still good. I did not even add up any more fuel into the tank, instead I just continue to uses the existing fuel inside Torii where it still have the header tank full.

Started the engine no problem, I increased the throttle, took off and bring it to hover. I think it was just about 30 seconds of hover, then I landed, where the full was almost finished!

[10-Jun-2009 Wednesday]

Today was still on leave, did some shopping earlier with my family. At the late evening, I took a time to fly my Torii.

During engine start up, I have mistakenly connected the +ve and -ve starter wire incorrectly to the battery, resulted that starter run backward! I just realized this after a few tries, luckily have not damage any part yet! Hmmm I need to be more careful next time. I have not made this mistake before, but if not careful it can happen again.

Then, started the engine ok. As usual, did on the ground control check, then took off success fully, did in-flight control check, everything is just fine as usual, switched to idle-up mode and continue flying. Did a few figure 8 flights.

Just before the take off, when the engine was running high enough, I notice there was high pitch knocking sound, something like ting ting ting, very rapidly. However I did not suspect anything serious.

After the figure 8 flights, I continued with stall turns. However, on the third stall turn, when trying to recover during Torii started to drop I noticed that the engine suddenly running at high pitch, the main rotor is not speeding up to level out Torii's flight. Oh my god, remembering may 2 previous major crashes with the same simptomps I quickly initiate auto-rotation (in the panic state), managed to slow down the rate of descend when Torri dropped to the ground. I was very hard landing, with broken vertical tail fin (again!) and bent spindle bar. Luckily there was no other damage.

Here is the photo at the hard landing location.

The engine was still running after the hard landing, I was able to try out and it seems that the clutch was slipping. I'll need to confirm this further.

::truemax