helofixer Posted June 12, 2008 Report Share Posted June 12, 2008 Found some shear bearings in the head of our 407 separating. Changed all 4 bearings. Spent 2.5 days and 30 flights/ground runs to get the aircraft in track and balance. RADS gear constantly not seeing the blades, no matter what angle of the tracker , painting and repainting the blades. Night tracking is worse. Finally took all hub weight off, zeroed the tabs and set links to nominal setting and started from scratch. Took about 9 ground runs and 8 flights after that to get the ride close to spec and the crew ride to be ok. We have been using the RADS on our 206's and never really have problems. 407's is a nightmare every time, no matter which 407 we use it on (we own 2 and work on 2 other aircraft.) Anyone else have this much problem with the RADS? Do you use any other system? I know it takes time, and Ive been wrenching on 407's for 7 years and 206's for 14 years, but it seems half the time the corrections the box says to use do not produce results...ride gets worse and takes way too much time and effort to smooth the rotor. Any input? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penwhip Posted June 12, 2008 Report Share Posted June 12, 2008 Never used rads, only vibrex 8500. Only time I've ever seen the changes make the ride worse the console vertical accelorometer was mounted upside down. And as far as nomalizing the pitch links, we also nomalize the trim tabs to the settings at the blade root. This seems to speed up the process. But I agree the 407 rotor system is ridiculously sensitive and a pain in the *** compared to the 206. from my experience getting the blades in good track, less than a 10mm spread is fairly important before you go for 60 knots. The 8500 seems to work pretty good form my experience, only time the smarttrack doesn't pick up the blades we're usually pointing directly into the sun.It has a few features I don't like, but you get used to it with a little time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaycalder Posted June 12, 2008 Report Share Posted June 12, 2008 I have no experience with the rads system, but have always had consistent results using the chadwick 8500 with a fastracker. I've seen some blades that just refuse to fly together, sometimes swapping the opposing or adjacent blades helps when all else fails. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
helofixer Posted June 15, 2008 Author Report Share Posted June 15, 2008 Update: After finally getting the aircraft in track, I decided to contact RADS customer support about our problem and got an interesting reply regarding tracker errors and partial errors on an aircraft with GARMIN 430 or 530 gps/radios. Yep... the problem child I was working on had the Garmin 430 and was turned on. Seems a Bell CSR was having a nightmare of a time getting an aircraft tracked in the field due to tracker camera errors. He even tried 2 different tracker cameras and data acq units and even different wiring and accelerometers. Out of desperation, they shut off the garmin and had no other problems! And in doing more reasearch, comes to find out that a lot of people in the field are having problems with Garmin equipped 407's affecting the RADS. So if you are getting a lot of camera errors and or partial readings and you have a Garmin equipped aircraft, turn it off and see if that improves things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.