The photo above is my original Raptor 60, at the time the only upgrade was the purple boom. This heli crashed the next day, a friend was flying it and he lost the tail rotor in flight. Unfortunately, it was pretty banged up and it shredded those MS Composite 680's that were on it.... As it turned out, the endcap of the torque tube slipped inside the tube causing all power to be lost to the tail. It was a factory defect. Ace made good on the parts except for the MS blades. I do thank them for making things right. After I received the parts I drilled and pinned the torque tube so it would never slip again!
This heli has the Webra 61 P5 Heli engine with the Weston Nitro pipe. To be honest, I had problems with this particular engine & pipe getting a good idle and a proper hover... Finally bit the bullet and added a Bellwood Red Anodized dual glow plug head from CyberHeli and now it's running better. I am running an OS#5 and an OS#8 plug giving me both heat ranges. It smoothed out the power band as well as the idle problem. Seems to be a good stong engine and is just now getting broken in and should only improve in time.
The Raptor was purchased as a kit from Heliproz at a great price, thanks to Eric @ Heliproz for the great price and fast and free shipping. It was a V2 version and it had both the old and new gears, oval links, rotor head hub and elevator arms. Assembly was straight forward and I had no problems with assembly. The only thing that threw me was the rotor is setup backwards from the Raptor 30. The blade grip arms are on the leading edge of the blades on the 60. Therefore, when the swashplate rises the collective drops... If you ever do a blade grip flip on a 30 you will have the same situation. There must be something the change as they thought the 60 would benefit from the leading edge arm.
The helicopter flies very well, it isn't pitchy at all in forward flight and hovers like a 60 ship should. It's much more stable than a 30 or 46 class machine. I'm just getting some metal upgrades for the heli, and will be adding those photos very soon to this website. I have painted the canopy as the stock white canopy with blue decals was very difficult to see in the air under certain conditions. Today that sucker has a very bright 3 color blend from bright red to neon orange fading into neon yellow. I must say it is very easy to see now in any waether, a huge improvement in visibility. Here's a picture of it along with my Raptor 46 with a figerglass canopy.
I installed the metal seesaw arms and aileron arms that are the new blue anodized ones from ThunderTiger. They look great and both came with all new bearings which was a pleasant surprise. I already had the aluminum oval links and elevator A-Arms from HeliProz. I have the new blue cooling fan in as well but haven't installed it as I haven't had the time to drop the motor and change it yet. I also have the all metal blue head with the O-Rings that I'll be installing soon as well. It really looks like a nice head and I know the O-Rings are really nice as I have already converted the stock head to O-Rings from Rick's RC. A very well spent 20 bucks for the O-Ring upgrade, it is basically the same one as the JR Vigor uses.
I also have the flybar control arm metal upgrade which is blue also. I will be installing it soon as well. I'm just waiting on some bad weather to come rolling in... Today is Dec. 1, 2001 and I just got back from the flying field today, it was a perfect day, almost no wind and about 68 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. The field was really busy so I was only able to get 5 flights in today. Funny considering we had snow and ice just 3 days ago... Tomorrow is supposed to be as nice and maybe even a few degrees warmer so I am sure you understand why I'm reluctant to tear the heli down right now. I'm sure I'll be at the field tomorrow as well, you just can't ignore days this nice this time of the year. I know we don't have many of those kind of days left before next spring.
I'm running a frame brace on the 60, it is the metal one that has a short vertical side so it is really rigid with the L-Shaped sides, much better than the flat metal or carbon solutions. I think I got it from HeliHut or was it CyberHeli? I forget but anyway, they work... get one if you don't already have it.
My tail rotor servo is mounted on a carbon mount that bolts on the rear main frame assembly and I'm running carbon pushrods and carbon boom supports. As a matter of fact, the carbon boom supports I purchase on ebay the other day included a hexagon shaped aluminum center brace that spans the frames on the inside just above the gas tank where the normal boom supports are mounted, you screew the bolts into the spacer instead of using a nylock nut.
ELECTRONICS:
I am using a Futaba R149-DP 9 channel PCM receiver with a Revolution base loaded antenna and a 2700mah Sanyo 4.8 NiMH battery pack. The servos are all digital except the Futaba 9403 that I have on the throttle, the 9403 is a high speed coreless servo and is ideal for a fast throttle, it would work great with a governor if you use one. The collective is a Futaba 9250 Digital Servo, on the cyclics I have the Hitec 5625 Digital Servos with metal gears. They work great and are cheaper than a 9202! I am running a Futaba GY401 Gyro and the matching 9253 Digital Servo and the tail holds extremely well.
TACHOMETER:
I read the forums at Ace, Rotory and RCO and have learned a lot of cool little tricks. One thing that I found that I really wanted was a tachometer on board but was disgusted at the prices they want for the "heli" versions that simply mount on the boom and look at the rotor disk. I found a perfect solution for under 35 bucks. It is a VDO CyTec 08 bicycle speedometer. It come with everything you need to mount it to a Raptor 60. Believe it or not, it ships with a neat little removable display unit and a base that is formed to fit on a Raptor 60 boom just right and is secured to the boom with a large O-Ring that loops around half the boom and holds the mount very tightly. The tach works off a hall sensor and magnet. What is really cool about this particular unit is you can remove your bottom mainshaft bolt and nut that goes through the bottom main gear and you flip the bolt to go in the opposite way and take the magnet that is threaded the same size as the stock bolt and screw the magnet onto the bolt with a pair of pliers. I had to dremel out the gear slightly to make the magnet fit just right but was no trouble to do. You don't need it real tight, just be certain you have plenty of locktite on it so it won't back out.
I have about 20 flights on mine without any problems. You need to remove the sensor from the stock sensor case only becasue the black plastic case around the sensor is too fat to get between the frame and gear. Be very careful handling the sensor, it is glass and has a vacuum inside it with twin elements so DON'T break it! I took the sensor out (cut it out with a dremel) and mounted it to a metal wire retainer that has an eylet on one end and is plastic coated and flexable to bend around your wiring, I'm sure you've seen them before. I took a piece of small heat shrink tubing and sealed the sensor and aligned it with the metal arm and then slid a slightly larger piece of heat shrink tubing over the sensor and the arm to hold the sensor to the arm and to provide some extra protection from fuel and the elements. I snugged the bolt lightly so I could pivot the arm and bent the arm until I got a reading from the sensot to the tach then tightened the bolt and I had a tach that works great. It will show actual headspeed in realtime and it has a second display line to indicate the max RPM since it was reset. I reset the tach after each flight. It will read to a 1/10 of an RPM and when it is idle for a half hour or so it goes into clock mode and will tell you what time it is.... pretty cool and it looks very nice. It doesn't look like a hack either, it really looks as though it was designed for a heli. See the two pics below. As you can see in the bottom photo the display shows a large zero at the top, this is the real time display, if you're running 1650 RPM it will show 165 on the top. The smaller numbers at the bottom show my last max RPM before it was reset, in this case my max headspeed was 1,680.3 RPM.
I took a few more shots of my 60. I have added the blue metal cooling fan, all blue metal flybar control arm unit and the metal washout base, the aluminum elevator arms and oval links are aftermarket and not factory.
The head is the Red Belwood dual glow plug custom head. I run an OS#5 and #8 plugs to get the benefit of both a hot and a cold plug.
The Belwood dual glow plug head below, now it idles great and has a little more top-end power!
I only have to ignite one to crank the engine. Pretty cool!
Below is the stock Raptor 60 cooling fan and the new TT factory metal fan upgrade, a big difference.
Below is the Webra/Weston ready to go.
The Weston doesn't require a frame support.
A closeup of the new TT blue metal Flybar Control Set
The new blue metal main rotor hub with adjustable O-Ring Dampers. Notice the top bearing is the new TT metal bearing block and the washout base is the new metal unit from TT. It is also available with anodized metal washout arms.
This is a stock Raptor 60 canopy I painted with Parma FasColor Paint. I airbrushed it with a std. dual action airbrush.
