500 Track And Balance

[egg beater]

Just like to open a disscusion on guys different tips and tricks to tracking and balancing those ever so finicky 500 rotor systems. Are you all following the MM to the tee? Or have you had better luck with other methods?

[Guest Bullet Remington]

EggBeater:

 

How about clarifing the question for an D.O.F.? (Dumb Old F@#T)

 

Are you talkin about after changing one blade, 2 or more blades, after a 300 hour, a head change, vibration resolution??

 

I do different things depending on what maintenance action I've done, or to address the specific snag annoying the driver.

 

Good post by the way!

 

BR

[egg beater]

BR,

 

How about, we go with my last situation, replaced one blade after very minor blade strike, just enuf damage to make the blade U/S, after about 20 starts, and 0.4 airtime, i finally persuaded the new blade to "fly" with the other, this was more difficult than the usual blade change. I am still new, but 98% of my time is 500 time, just wondering if anyone out there has any good tips on how to make things go easier, i got everything well with in limits but i know it could still be better. I love seeing Knife Edge blades. Any tips anyone?

 

One good Q thou, MM tells you to use only tabs after ground track at 70%NR, I have tracked ASTARS and know that they would rather you use pitch link than tab, i really hate to use much tab thou on 500's. Any thoughts?

 

I know there are some 500 T&B guru's out there

[lamanated]

the last bit of tab is always just a tweak it seems on the high speed zone..I think I took off a half a degree on half the zone to get the lone high flying blade down,but ips still stayed at .2 ,But I got the lateral to .02(pure luck though)

[egg beater]

Lamanated,

 

my new blade insisted on flying about 3" higher than the rest which stayed perfectly in track, believe it or not i used the full 5 degrees for the slow and some of the high speed section just to pull it into track, with all that tab i expected the worst, but unbelievably i sit at .03 lat and just nicely under .2 vert :up: , only thing i believe the all that tab did was give me about a .2 vert on low power decents, machine is still an amazing stump puller. Perhaps my initial move should have been to bring the other blades up to it which would have induced less drag, but then again, its all within limits and hasnt affected performance once so ever :up:

[Helilog56]

Eggbeater.....sounds a touch excessive on the tabbing for that one blade....a reminder, did you make sure the "orange zone" had not been tampered with prior?

Is it a PMA blade you are trying to track? A word of caution to all you good "trackers" out there.....a blade that refuses to track properly (erratic) "could" be trying to tell you something, an example could be a cracked spar or head problems.

[egg beater]

Helilog,

 

Yup, Zeroed the entire lenth, and yes it was one of those lovely PMA blades :down:

[T tail]

A while back we unfortunately had foreign object damage to one of our MD blades and it had to be replaced by a PMA blade, The PMA liked to hang out a few inches above the rest of the disc and it wasn't until we bent the whole tab down that it came into line...we now have a whole set of PMA and apart from not being able to pull the skin off a custard pudding they are at least keeping in track.

The 500 definitely is a machine that needs to have a knife edge disc..I have been in some that over 100 knots it feels like your in a Hiller 12E and others that are as smooth as silk at well over 130 knots :up: , the smooth knife edge machines are definitely a joy to fly and good T & B is something to strive for.

 

Cheers TT