[bensidus197217]

I have flown around 200 battery packs through my HK500 and I believe it is getting close to being worn out. First off the tail belt is about 2/3 of what it was from new, second the linkages are getting a bit of slop that they never had. Last but not least most of the wear seems to be in the tail rotor assembly ie control arms and thier pins. I gave it a good check over after it went a little hard to handle today and found one of the links to the see saw the stabilizer paddles and shaft are controlled by broke. Now keep in mind this is a HK500GT so because it is a clone of Trex 500 I have a question. How fast does a trex500 wear out when do you start to see slop. Reason is that if the wear factor is much better then I will start to convert my clones to trex with Align parts. I have a 600 (I hope) coming and I want to make a scale model so I want to make sure I get peace of mind as well as not go broke.

[xv-townboy]

200 packs isnt to bad for a clone i would think..Even align stuff is mediocre at best.Their bearings are nothing special and will get sloppy pretty quick depending on the type of flying that you do.If your anything like me you will never wear anything out..I just dont fly enough so its pretty much a non issue for me lol...Sounds like your having fun thats for sure

[bensidus197217]

I fly about four to eight packs a day on average. I do miss the odd day and I don't often fly eight packs in a day. I figure it's holding up pretty good at this point so no complaining here. As far as flying goes I only do sport and for me a figure eight is pretty racy stuff, if it gets too high then things get really exciting. I noticed it was getting harder to control today so the broken link combined with slop gave that problem. I have another unused airframe I think it's time to do a swap over of some parts.

[gi1mo2]

I would be interested in knowing which parts you already replaced frothe original kit. Ijust finished buidling an HK500GT, and after 5 packs, a screw to the tail shaft sheered off and I was able to land, but hard enough to break a landing gear. I have ordered a metal tail assembly. I also noticed that there is a problem wih the tail gear and the autorotation gear. The two don't touch close enough, and gear is stripped.

[bensidus197217]

That gear strips real easy all you have to do is contact the ground with the tail rotor and it will take out the tail drive gear. I found that with HK the white coloured gears strip much easier than the black gears.I have replaced the tail drive gear twice on my GT and on my stock HK500 I took out the tail drive gear and the larger gear once each. The gear you mentioned is a loose fit to the other one but if you don't give the tail rotor any sudden stops it holds up quite well. I find the gear system to be the weakest link with these helis.

[Max]

The way I look at it- a helicopter is a bunch of moving parts rubbing against each other.

Take the cyclic, for example. At 2000 RPM the ball links on the cyclic will be pushing/pulling 2000 times a minute. That is a lot of back and forth!

if you have a 5 minute flight, that is 10,000 push-pulls per flight.

If you fly your heli for 200 flights (200 packs as noted by OP) that is 2,000,000 push-pull cycles. And that is just te linkages. The same rate of friction will apply to all the other moving parts, and even more for the tail that spins approx 15:1. Will something wear out? You bet!

Wear-and-tear and replacing parts is part of the heli genre. Even full size aircraft have to log airtime so that the proper maintenance can be carried out.

It is always wise to inspect your heli periodically for wear and tear and replace parts that start to show wear or slop.

[bensidus197217]

Right on I never thought of it that way.So really this tells me that this thing really is doing well based on all that movement. So really one should keep all the moving parts spares on hand and not have too many different models due to the cost of stock.