Rick's b.log - entry 2011/01/02

Now we're cooking with gas!

It is okay. The battery ran low. But you can see what I mean about the "aaaaargh!" behaviour. ☺

In a nutshell, the main... driveshaft? I'm not sure what the correct terminology is. Anyway, there are two, for the rotors spin in opposite directions. The lower blades (and outer shaft) are fairly rigidly attached. The upper blades (inner shaft) are more flexible due to the balance bar.
The inner shaft used to have two little protruding lugs which fit into the blade holder. The blade holder could tilt on these, as required by the balance bar.
During the last flight, when the helicopter fell out of the sky, these lugs were wrenched off with the force of a thousand mammoths. Well, perhaps not quite, but the upper blades flapped around like dying fish on land and it was pretty obvious that we were now talking strictly two dimensions.

So given the eBay guy has yet to get in touch with me (will he ever?), I decided to do my own repair. I removed the inner shaft, and carefully drilled a thin hole into the place where the lug should be. I then pushed a core of thickish earth cable into this hole and clipped it to size. It is loose, I decided not to attempt to glue it in place. As the rotor spins, the bit of metal rests against the end of the rotor. In essence, there's nowhere for it to go so it holds the whole assembly in place quite nicely.

Here's a picture, the magenta showing how this little metal 'rod' fits in. There are two, actually, one on the other side too.

And while we're here, take a giggle at:

Proof reading is a lost art

And:

The guilty party is Sams "Teach yourself PHP in 24 hours", third edition.

The running chinese hat!

So I find myself staring at this:

I use Google translate to look up the word for "minute" (I also have a little Japanese dictionary, but Google is simpler). It is a little chinese hat, with legs, running. Or 分.
I also know the numbers, when written in Japanese, are (from one to ten): 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九 十.
Zero is zero.

So let's look at this again:

And finally...

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