Vintage RC Helicopters - Joe's collection Vario Bolkow Bo 105

Vario Bolkow Bo105

Acquired summer 2007 from E-bay (as usual??).  I had first seen it advertised from a bloke in Germany who was willing to post it anywhere in Europe so thinking that it would go for a lot I didn't really bid however, it only went for £750. It then came up again on E-bay a month later, alarm bells???  I contacted the seller and basically he was a early flyer who had bought it thinking to progress to scale, I suspect that you can see what was coming.  He tried it, frightened himself daft, luckily did not damage it and so decided to sell it on.

I gave it the once over and it appeared OK though on starting the fan came loose and on attempting to tighten it up my crankshaft locking tool slipped and broke the piston skirt.  It was therefore put to one side whilst the new bits were bought; on an aside the replacement engine bits came to over half the cost of a new engine................ I also decided to fit a Vario 'flybarless gyro' in order to help tame the beast as at that time I had not tried a flybarless head.

  (1)    (2)    (3)    (4)    (5)

Jan 09 - Moving on a year and one nice calm (but very cold) day everything was finally ready for testing.  After a good 30 mins of ground running to get the new bits in the engine settled down it was finally time to try a lift off.  The Multi-blade gyro was initially set to 'off' in order to get the helicopter basically set up.  (1) Took nearly ten minutes to get into a reasonable hover as I really couldn't get my head around the controls; it seemed it wanted to go anywhere but where I wanted it to.  (2 &3) Finally, trims set and quite stable but once moving it would rear up quite a bit unless quickly controlled.  The 'Vario' gyro  gain was increased and it started to settle down plus I was getting used to 'flybarless' flying.  (4) Now quite stable and up into a slightly higher hover however, as tail control was very sluggish and 'wagging' quite a bit, nothing adventurous was tried.  (5)  The hazards of garden hovering - watch it and don't back into the bird feeder!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  By the way it's a big helicopter and yes, it was as close as it looked to the hedge and plants and yes I have backed one into the hedge - my Knight 50 doh.........

So a reasonably successful session though on checking a number of links were a little 'slack' for my liking plus I intended to fit a modern heading hold gyro as it was hard enough without having the extra 'load' of keeping the tail still.  However after checking over the linkages and renewing a few that were slack I found that the tail rotor servo mount had broken plus the linkage was very stiff so no wonder the tail system was not working properly.  Once repaired and test hovered, tail control was surprisingly good even though I had NOT replaced the gyro.  Started to do figure eights but really needed an open area to allow the helicopter to move about properly.

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