I had a scary situation happen to me a few days ago in which my right side horizontal stabilizer broke off the tail boom and fell to the ground and has not been found yet.
I am attaching a few pictures of what I found still attached to the tail boom but the right side stab was gone and luckily fell off clear of the tail rotor.
My helicopter is an older Exec 90 converted to Jet Exec. I don't know how many total hours are on the helicopter. The failure happened after I completed a tail rotor balance and was doing a few circuits after the balancing. I looked at the building plans for the Exec 90, 162 and Talon and it looks like they are all the same as far as how the horizontal stab is built and attach the the tail boom. The drawings of all three versions show there's an outer and an inner tube and the inner tube is extended inside the outer tube and is attached with the two inboard, top and bottom rivets, the left side of the stabilizer has rivets that locks the inner and outer tubes together but the right side does not have these extra rivets. What happened to my ship is that metal fatigue got the best of the outside tube and broke but without the extra (inside the tail boom rivets) my right side stabilizer was free to tall right off the tail and luckily fell clear of the tail rotor. I am posting this as a PSA so this does not happen to anyone else. I will add this on my annual inspection list to check for cracks on the outside H stab at the first two inboard rivets. I have now added rivets to the right stab spar inside the tail boom so it is not possible for the stab to slide away should the outer tube fractures. I can't figure why the left side stab has rivets to lock the inner and outer tubes and the right side does not.
Any idea what happened here?


together but the right side does not ?????

just a friendly reminder to inspect those slider balls, as noted theres been a history of these seizing from being too tight or bad lubrication. i like the idea of drilling grease holes to lubricate both the slider and the shaft from the rotating swashplate. how many have done this? i did get the specs for the plating from Robin aswell as ordered a new sliderball from her as its nearly cheaper than getting it replated for me considering there are no electroplating services in Alaska it seems...

good news is my Mast is corrosion free with no signs of pitting!

I'm soon going to be starting on flight controls on my A600 kit and am interested in talking engine governors. @David Chow , @Slavik Krassovsky  and everybody else that is familiar or interested.

My only experience in piston helicopters is from 40-50 years ago in military OH-13 and TH-55.  The TH-55 had an overspeed governor and frankly i can't remember what the OH-13 had.   Of course this A600 kit comes with no governor.

Question for everybody, how distracting is the no governor. and how helpful is one.   What options are available?    I have a @Joe R Huff Sr  engine that I will be putting in.   My understanding is (I have not yet uncrated the engine) he has an automotive style single fuel control.   No fadec, no carburetors.   So not sure how that will play in.

Thoughts??
   Thanks in advance.
Sam

As a relative newbie in the Rotorway community I heard about problems with windshield droop in later kits made from poorly fitting panels and windshields.    I saw a bunch of pictures of what happens if you're not careful if you have the bad fitting kits.   I'm building an A600 Phoenix from two kits, both incomplete which are stripped down to bare bones and starting from scratch. And when I fitted everything from the partial kit I had and matched the drillholes, I had the dreaded droop.   Clearly visible with the naked Eye, and measurable with my levels.  I saw Paul Barroso had a simple jig he used, but then again, he does this for a living so correcting it is pretty cut and dried for him.  I asked him for some additional information on a dimension on his jig but never heard back.   So, I just went with what I saw on his picture.   For me the critical dimension that I never saw anywhere else, build videos, or manuals was the 39" across the bottom of the eyebrow panels he showed on his jig.  I hope it is correct for practical purposes.   For me that was the critical missing piece.  With that, I went about making my jig.   Which i did from scrap laying around the shop and trial and error.   I am building solo mostly so I have to plan for doing all this jig fitting with only my two arthritis ridden hands.


Way overthought.   But I felt I needed to have a good reference so I made sure my lateral drive tubes were level, and since a new build, and the seat back not yet drilled, I made sure the seat back was in proper place and had the necessary shims to bring it to lateral level.  Also measured across the entire cabin as shown with the long bubble level and I laid a straight edge on the inside seat pan edges resting on the forward portion of the pans.  Those two levels, were within .10 degrees of the drive tube lateral levels.   Franken Jig is sitting firm on the seat pan with adjustable legs (the little narrow small vertical pieces circled in red, slide up and down independently with a wingnut on the back to clamp when it's all level).  That extra effort was to be able to have it all in place while I stood back to use human eye leveling as well as actual levels.


The part of the jig that gives symmetrical shape to the top of the windshield is based off Paul Barroso's 39 inches from end to end on the bottom.   I used a French curve from my old drafting set to transfer the curve of the passenger side eyebrow to a piece of large ruled drafting paper from another drawer in my old Pre-Cad days drafting table.   Copied the identical curve onto the other side of the paper (folded it in half for mirror image), cut it out, and laid it on this board as a template.   Cut the board, marked the center at 19.5 inches and starting on each end of the jig, marked one-inch centers.  The vertical lines on the jig are measured not from center, but from the edges and used in conjuntion with the level board resting on the eyebrow cabin pieces.  Those were just so I could measure droop from each side to insure they matched.   The little small board above it is also marked with a frame/rotor system center point.  The problem I found, and it may not be one, is the center of the seat back pan;  (circled in red) well, it’s not centered with the fuselage.   It is pushed as far to the pilot’s side as possible per the instructions and everything I’ve seen and read so far.   Leveled and clamped in this position, the center of the seat pan is almost a half inch to the passenger side of center.


When I put the windshield on using this jig, it fits, works, appears and measures as level.   The holes on the passenger side match, but the pilot side holes in the cabin top will have to be filled and re-drilled.


I have the fuselage centered and laterally leveled.  Plumb bobs from the rear of tail boom, mast, and center of frame at the front all line up.   The bottom line is the droop will no longer be there after I repair all the misaligned holes in the pilot side body.   I’m not entirely sure what I am going to do if anything about the entire seat pan/back being a half inch off center.  While all my plumbs and levels are still in place, I’ll get another set of eyes on it here locally and see if there is anything that can or should be done with the centering issue.   I plan on dropping my Plumbs from each body side and measuring that distance from center to see if it also shows fuselage off center.   Oh well?

I’d be interested in what other may have experienced with theirs.   In the meantime, the body panels will be coming off here very soon and I’ll be moving on.   Have to finish mounting tail boom vertical fin brackets (That’s what I was doing when RotorX folded and the parts dried up).  Then on to flight control installation.    If you have any comments or questions I’d love to hear them.

Below is a list of known Rotorway Insurance providers. Please reply to this thread with your flight experience and insurance premium/coverages so we all have a general idea of what is fair! Also, please reply if you have any other providers to add to the list in any country.

 

I did this conversion a long time ago to see if putting a Diesel Deltahawk engine into a RW would be a good idea. we managed to get it all working and started the testing. for the test we wanted to be safe so we tied down the RW in a tandem trailer still connected to my car and started the engine.
This setup has a centrifugal clutch and an isolating donut style damper with a seperate one way between the engine and the gearbox. I decided to keep the Vee belt drive line to the tail rotor so I replaced the secondary with a simple shaft and from the input to the gearbox we installed a toothed drive pulley driving the shaft to which the standard Vee pulley was mounted.

WE decided to not proceed with offering this upgrade, as the power that the engine put out was, in my opinion, way too much for the rotor system, as with the RW tied down to the trailer and 4 separate scales beneath each wheel we could pull and hold full up (+10deg) collective and raise and lower the RRPM via the throttle. at that point 2 of the scales had gone to zero and the other 2 showed we were lifting over 1000kg (2204lbs) I decided I could not trust that the RW rotor system could handle that much power so we abandoned the idea and built a brand new helicopter with the DH engine , the DH2

First I’d like to thank @Orv Neisingh for having a link to his website here.   While scrolling through, was reading about the short lived Elite and wondering what made it so much faster?  Combination of things, or something in particular?

some overall photos of the mods I am talking about.