Eddie's Raptor 50V2
Hi my name is Eddie Tee, and my good friend Andrew from Hambleton Helis has asked me to write a review of the Raptor 50 kit.
First i will explain a bit about me so you know where I'm coming from! I had absolutely no experience of remote control models of any sort when I bought my Raptor 50 kit. My background with aircraft models was solely limited to making scale model plastic kits. I had little engineering experience either, only having done 'simple-jobs' on various classic cars I've owned over the years. That reminds me to tell you I paid for the Raptor 50 from the proceeds of auctioning my family's second car, a tired Jaguar saloon. The heli cost me somewhat more than I got for the Jag! Anyway I digress.
Andrew persuaded me that a Raptor 50 was the machine to go for, so I paid my money to his 'contact' and a few days later Andrew produced a very substantial looking Raptor 50 v2 box. Happily clutching said box on the bus home, I looked forward with a mixture of excitement and trepidation to working on my first r/c model. Next morning I rose at an unfeasibly early hour to commence the build. First impressions were good. On opening the box and comparing the contents of the numerous plastic bags with the instruction book it became apparent that the good people at Thunder Tiger Corp had carefully packed all the parts needed for each stage in separate plastic bags. This was a big help. Quickly leafing through the 40 page instruction book I was amused to read the warning "Do not open all the plastic bags at once."
Construction starts with the fuel tank assembly. I soon had the various tubes and grommets in place and in short order was on to stage two 'Clutch Bell Assembly'. In a little under 45mins I had these first two stages completed and congratulated myself on a job well done. A cup of tea later, and I moved on to stage three, 'main frame assembly -part 1'. This is where you join the two sides of the heli's fuselage together. Here I ran into my first puzzle. The exploded photo diagram, was somewhat vague on which of the 30+ self tapping screws went where. Worst still, there were two types of screw - and it wasn't clear which type to use on which pre-drilled hole. After an hour or so of head scratching I eventually realised that the eight HSA3-10 screws were for use with the eight metal spacers. The other type was for all the other holes. This was my first lesson in Raptor building; the exploded diagrams look good, but they are not idiot proof - they won't explain everything. That said, stage 4 " main drive gear assembly" was very straight forward. Andrew told me not to worry about the 'one way clutch grease' mentioned in instructions at this point. Stage 5 was the washout assembly. Here I came across the first of the ball linkages. These are all over the Raptor, so it's important to understand how they work. The hooped part of each control rod goes over the linkage ball and fits around the middle of it's circumference. When I first fitted the control rods to my ball linkages, I pushed the control rod hoops all the way down to the base of each ball. This will give you some limited movement, but not enought. The instructions don't tell you these things; you have to either have plenty of common sense, or a little bit of engineering experience. Better still, find someone who knows model helis already and get them to check your work. I got to stage 6 quite after maybe three hours work all told - and that is probably pretty slow. This stage, 'main frame assembly - part 2'involved more work on the control rods and levers at the top of the helicopter body. Here I managed to ruin screw HMJ2-14N. I hadn't worked out that the second figure on all screw part numbers is a clue to its length. The higher the dash number, the longer the screw is. In this case'-14N' was one of the longest screws in the kit and I had tried to fit it to three or four different holes using a cheap screwdriver which slowly damaged the slots in its phillips head due to the torque needed to screw this long component all the way in. Andrew told me that one of his friends did the same thing with his Raptor 50 kit so be warned! Thunder Tiger give you absolutely no spares with the kit so this was inconvenient. Why can't they be like Ikea who for the smaller parts sometimes provide a few more than one needs. I eventually had to buy a Raptor spare screw bag from my local heli shop to get a replacement HMJ2-14n screw. I would recommend buying one of these with your kit at the outset. Stage's 7 (main shaft) and 8 (engine ancilleries) were relatively easy. When tightening up the bolts on the engine fan I used the handle of a toothbrush to lock the engine piston in place, thus avoiding having to buy a piston lock as recommended by the instructions. Fitting the OS50 engine to the airframe in stage 9 and 10 I found my plastic modelling skills came to the fore as I had to thin one of the transverse struts in carbon base plate BK0525 to get it to fit over the engine. A Dremel type model drill fitted with a sanding head made short work of this. The fun really started with the work on the main rotor head in stage 11 and 12. Try as I might I could not get the main rotor head assembly together. Andrew diagnosed an incorrectly fitted flap damper (ie the main soft bearing in the rotor head), which I failed to push into place properly. Again, the instructions don't quite tell you the full story, you have to have either common sense or experience to get your heli together. With the problems I had with stages 11 and 12, I skipped to the stages covering the tail boom and tail unit assembly. No problems were encountered here although Andrew pointed out later that I'd reverse-fitted the tail unit securing bolts. Slightly frustrated by my progress I decided to work on the body to cheer myself up. This is a large, soft plastic vacuum molding. Cutting off the excess plastic, making various holes and test fitting the clear canopy were all good fun and easy. Andrew advised me not to paint the body, as the paint is vunerable to attack from exhaust gasses and damage caused by fuel leakage. However, being a plastic modeller with years of painting experience, I was determined not to leave my Raptor unpainted and took advice from the local model shop. This proved to be a disaster. I was sold some polyurethene paint which was for use with model cars. I selected a royal blue colour and carefully sprayed the whole of the top of the heli, above the body swage line. It looked great but when I came to put the standard Raptor body stripes on large sections of the paint just flaked away like skin on a rice pudding. Unfortunately, it made such a mess of the attractive Raptor transfers that I had to abandon any thought of using them. This did have one positive outcome though, as I was forced to find an alternative set and found one from www.rcgraphics.co.uk who sell on ebay. I got a superb set of transfers from them for £18.00. These were posted to me immediately, were well packed and were easy to use. The end result was a smart bright green Raptor with fierce tiger mouth markings. Hopefully a picture will appear on the Hambleton Heli web-site soon. If you go for this scheme too, you should be aware that the tiger mouth transfers are a bit fiddly as the self-adhesive used is quite strong, so once placed on the helicopter they cannot be easily re positioned. At this point it was time to fit the electrics, servos and their control. Whilst the instructions are OK, there is plenty of room for error. Indeed my first attempt to fit the servos was strewn with mistakes such as not fitting the ball joint securing screws to the back of the servo plates. At this stage, Andrew took pity on me and agreed to take over, so he finished off my main rotor assembly, did all the servos and electrics and adjusted the control rods.
Thanks Andrew!
My conclusions on the Raptor 50 kit are as follows.
- This is a well engineered, quality product, well packaged which comes with a good set of instructions.
- To build the kit properly access to advice from 'someone who knows helis' is almost essential. To Thunder Tiger's credit the instructions do suggest this on the opening page.
- Do not rely on the instruction book to take you through everything - you will need to think a bit! That said the majority of the work is straight forward.
- Make sure you use only best quality screwdrivers etc or you will risk damaging screw heads.
- If you are a novice don't let anything I've said put you off. The end result is a very impressive, exciting looking machine.
At the time of writing, I've done a lot of simulator time hovering tail on, and am looking forward to my first flight. I'll let you know how I get on.
I wish you happy helicoptering!
Eddie
