This is the very first flight of my E600. I've done all the setup myself, and I'm very nervous.
. . .
So what happened is that once it became light enough it the tail whipped around the wrong way and I shut it down just quickly enough to avoid
any damage.
This would be a setup issue w/ the 401 HH gyro - I didn't understand the part in the directions about setting the response direction, and it
turned out to be backwards of what I needed - so the gyro would try to correct in the wrong direction.
Decided to get ahold of the guy I bought it from and ask for some help in the final setup and initial flight checkout.
Got the setup/checkout help. Starting for real to fly.
. . .
This machine is *so* much better than the esky. it's more stable. This is exactly what I have been hoping for. So I'm going to re-do the Radd flight
lessons and try to do a really good job.
10 nov 2008 - past Radd
By now have put in a little over 1 1/2 hrs. I'm now at a point that I never reached w/ the Honey Bee - I am actually practicing takeoff/landing w/ a short
hover.
Now have about 4 hrs in. It still looks like a drunken sailor, but every time I fly it seems to get a little better.
. . .
I'm feeling more and more comfortable
flying it. However, I might be going too fast. Today I started trying to add in more work with the tail and collective, and got myself in trouble - 2 near-crashes.
This has me a little worried about how the collective is setup, so I'm going to try to figure out exactly what rpm/pitch it takes off at, and try to
configure the transmitter better to help me. Right now the pitch and throttle curves are straight lines 0..100%, and my experiences today made me feel
pretty strongly that that's not a good thing.
Here are the results of the pitch/rpm study:
. . .
Bascally, I feel that I learned that there is a pretty much linear but inverse relationship between throttle and pitch (I know the throttle curve doesnt look
particularly linear, but I was there - I think it's linear). And I learned that at about 65/65 is where they cross.
The second set shows the relationship between RPM and pitch at takeoff - also a somewhat linear deal. Both curves pretty much no news except for the specific numbers
they reveal.
The point of all of this was to discover "scientifically" how to setup my throttle and pitch curves to my best advantage - especially relative to how sensitive the machine
is going to be to collective once it's airborne. So here are the throttle/pitch curves I decided to start with. Basically, I decided that at 75% stick, I wanted to be just
lifting off. And I didnt want there to be too much responsiveness to the stick after that, so I decided to limit the pitch and throttle to 75%, which would translate to +6 deg
pitch (not even 3 deg over liftoff pitch), and 75% throttle (seemed conservative):
To me, these curves look pretty radical - capping both at below 75%. Hopefully this will help tame the collective, as I feel that I'm at a point
where I need to do more than just hover, which to me equates to just fiddling with the cyclic. I need to start actively managing altitude and being much
more actively in control of the tail. In other words, I feel I need to be using more than 2.5 of the 4 controls.
Today I flew in the barn - and did one long hover that used the whole battery. I'm *totally* stoked.
. . .
In the barn due to weather. The barn is far from ideal - the actual space is about 15' X 15', and since there are no windows and the stall doors are open, there
are some tricky drafts. The horses are very interested in the whole deal - and stand there and comment on the whole thing. Per Radd, I put a square target on
the floor and work at staying exactly over that, 6-12" up. The reality of "staying exactly over" that, means that I will let the machine slide off the square so that the
rotor disc is no longer over it. This puts the machine close to damage and I put it on the ground.
Flying on the lawn as much as I can. Today I noticed a clicking noise when it's spinning down
. . .
And for some reason the blades catch and pivot out of their normal
position just as they are about ready to stop - this is a new behavior.
The noise and catching business is due to the auto-rotation clutch. I disassembled this, cleaned it with brake cleaner, re-oiled and re-assembled and things
work a lot better now.
Crap - big crash today. The dreaded tail strike.
. . .
I have been more active w/ all 4 controls, and thought that I had the radio setup well to help me be safe with the collective, but it can still sail off much
higher than I am comfortable flying. My lawn has trees and shrubs, and of course the house. So when it goes up and I kinda loose control of where it is,
I try real hard to get it down. Today it was very close to the little maple and the lamp post, and I didnt want it to crash into those, so I really slammed it
down from about 2'. It came down flat but tipped to the L, and hard enough for the rotors to catch the tail boom. The rotors are Maverikk Pro, a carbon fiber
blade - very smooth, beautiful, and kinda heavy, and apparently very strong!. With the first hit, the rotor actually grabbed the tail boom and swung it a full 90 deg
to the left side of the heli, the blade itself was badly broken. The second blade came around and took the boom even farther forward, but was going lots slower,
so it had less damage. Basically will need to replace everything in the tail starting w/ the boom; both blades, there is quite a bit of damage to the flybar.
Here are some pictures - I've already started straightening out stuff, so it doesn't look nearly as bad as it was initially:
This is actually fun and challenging.
. . .
Replacing the broken parts is not just a simple matter, and I'm also converting from flybar to SK360 - no instructions there.
But I found a way to use all the existing parts, only need to buy a locking collar for the mast to hold the washout slider in place. I *really* like the clean look
of the new rotor head. Total rebuild time - about 16 hrs, and about $600 - $300 to replace the damaged stuff and about $300 for the SK360.
Here's a couple of pictures of the swash/rotor head setup that I did. I'm kinda proud of this, and really *love* the nice clean look:
There was a lot of extra wire because I was able to put the reciever and SK360 right in the middle of the servos. The twisting is supposed
to inhibit any electronic interaction between the signals on the various wires. It also will shorten the effective length of the wire by
about 1/3.
So tody was the first checkout flight. There was a big wobble in the rotor mast, so that needs to be replaced.
The machine flys really quite differently than it did before
. . .
I feel like I'm back at square 1 with a totally new machine. And it's rather unpredictable, which
I need to work out by adjusting the SK360 I guess. But I also noticed that there is still some significiant vibration - the horiz. stabilizer has a big vertical
vibration in the left side. The blades are balanced and tracking..
I have been really trying hard to figure out what's going on w/ the machine.
. . .
Trying to understand where the vibration is coming from, and trying to translate between
the behaviors I see and the info in the manual about what needs to be adjusted on the SK360. Overall, so far I'd say that I'm at a large loss in confidence
relative to being able to control the machine, not only in the cyclic, but also collective, and there is this damn intermittent twitching that the 401 likes to do.
So today more time trying to learn/control the new machine, and things got a little out of hand resulting in a slightly hard landing. The only damage this time was
the blades and the tail rotor blades. And I read somewhere that vibration can also come from a bent feathering shaft - easy enough to check, so I did and found that
it was bent. Hopefully this will fix that vibration I had been trying to sort out.
In the barn. Decided to adjust the Hiller gain on the SK360, so starting w/ 55%. Checking tracking, etc.
. . .
The vibration is totally gone, it's quiet and smooth
again! The 55% Hiller gain made a nice difference in how it handles - still not the rock solid hover I had been hoping for but better. Also fiddling w/ the gain
on the HH side of the 401 - set it to 50%. This seems better, will fly for a while and see how it feels.
Still slowly changing the Hiller gain and trying to get the 401 working better.
. . .
The Hiller gain was set at 60% which improved things more, so I will set it to 65% for the next flight.
For the HH, I've been going back to the basics, in particular the manufacturer's setup instructions. The things I had glossed over before were the
setup of the servo for the rate mode - I had read online that this wasn't necessary, just use the trims on the transmitter to take care of this and be done with it.
Which is what I did, but never got satisfactory performance, so trying it the way the factory thinks is best. It took me a while to get things setup so that
with the servo centered, it would fly with virtually no transmitter trim. Bt that's how it's setup now. WooooooHooooo!!!!!
Still working on getting the Hiller adjustment in the SK360 - is at 70% now, and generally I think the machine is more stable. But it
still likes to wander off in some direction rather unexpectedly, which is unnerving.
. . .
In one of these wanders, it also started having HH twitches and then loosing altitude, and the stress of actually needing to deal with all
4 controls at the same time got me into a little panic, and I let it get a little tail-low. This was in my driveway, which has 5/8" gravel. So
the tail rotor caught some rocks and threw them at the blades and took a chunk out of one of the blades. I'm quite sure that wood blades are
not the answer, and flying low over gravel is also not a smart thing to do.
This time going back to blades like the ones it came with - maverikk pro. the pair costs about the same as the 2 sets of wooden blades I've
gone through.
I've resolved that I simply must toe the line and work strictly on control of the hover - it's so darn easy to have fun and try some
(slightly) more exciting things, like having the machine move to point B and then back to point A all under (sort of) control. Anyway - no more
of that - just the hover - in the box.
Adjusting the Hiller gain in the SK360 is going slow - I change the setting, and then use a battery to decide what to do next. And the changes
are 5% adjustments. Every change so far has had positive results, so I'll keep going with this.
I installed the new Maverikk blades - didn't even balance them! And very tentatively spin up the machine.
. . .
Crap!!! Now there's a new problem. The current listing of problems that's blocking me flying is:
- the heading hold gyro likes to jerk the tail around sometimes
- *new* problem - just prior to takeoff, the heli moves around - I think precessing is the correct word - in very small circles, and fairly rapidly
- even w/ the 70% hiller gain, it still likes to wander off, fairly vigorously in random directions
- the unexpected jumps and dips are still there and still scary
So my plan is to remove the SK360, reinstall the flybar and see how many of these problems go away. my guess is that 2 & 3 will disappear, and hopefully even
#4.
The thing is, when I first started flying it, the machine was smooth and predictable. It was a little faster to respond than I liked, and I messed up w/ the
pitch curve, and had the big crash, but basically it was a pleasure to fly, and now it's definitely *not* - its just plain scary and unpredictable.
After being so discouraged from the previous flight - it was easy to skip a few flying days - it was rainy anyway.
. . .
But I tried again today, and decided to double-check tracking, and sure enough, it was out 1 whole turn of one of the control rods. This seemed to iron out
stuff, as this time I felt like the machine was predictable enough that it was worth the time working. I actually put in 2 long hovers - very low to the ground,
but still. The Hiller gain was set to 75%, and I decided that I like that for now, but I also felt that control response was mushy around center, so I'll
make the deadband smaller and try that.
With this small success, and since the machine had 2 attacks of the "tail twitch", I decided to revisit the tail rotor setup again after the battery charge.
I found that the linkage was binding at the extreme of clockwise. Here is the info I've been referring to online to help me setup the gyro:
There are clearly differing opinions about how to do this, and I had been particularly attracted to the notion that the mechanical setup needs to be fully
correct, and *then* you can go and fiddle w/ the gyro. So that was my approach.
The thing is, once the mechanical setup was correct, I went ahead w/ the rest of the setup, and never really sat back and re-checked the whole thing.
So what I've learned, and this may only apply to my heli, is that if your tail rotor control is asymmetrical, you can't get the asymmetry out by changing the
length or position of the linkages. And when you look at the tail rotor shaft of my machine, you can clearly see that there is more space on one side of the
slider than the other when it's in its dynamic neutral position. And of course, the short side, the nose right side, was binding after I had completed the
dynamic adjustments.
I did try one more time to mechanically adjust the asymmetry out of the system, which didnt work. But I *do* now have one piece of information that will be helpful
in the future. This is the tail rotor trim setting that produces 0 deg deflection of the tail rotors, which for these blades/pitch/throttle settings is
-56. This means that the next time I need to fiddle w/ the tail rotor, I should be able to get the mechanical setup extremely close on the first try.
The short story here is that I reverted to following the Futaba instructions - pretty much to the letter. We'll see tomorrow how that works.
I cant help myself - I just think about this a lot.
. . .
It's still about how to set things up to maximize my chances of:
- *not* crashing
- learning to fly
- having fun
- not becoming divorced
And of course trying to decide what if any "right way" there is.
I think the final answer is, there are a bunch of different things you can do, and they have their advantages and disadvantages, and you can use all or some or none.
I've decided that the throttle/pitch curves are the right place to deal with the sensitivity of the machine to the collective. In this
section I discuss transmitter setup, and I've actually implemented that in my transmitter. The curves above are history.
After repairs from the big crash, one of the things I did was just totally flatten the pitch/throttle curves *at* the liftoff point, and then gradually add back pitch and
throttle until the machine would just make about 6' up at full stick. After I had done that I felt a little safer. Here are the numbers for my current pitch/throttle
curves:
| 0% | 25% | 50% | 75% | 100% |
|---|
| Pitch: | 41% | 48% | 55% | 66% | 77% |
| Throttle: | 0% | 35% | 55% | 60% | 62% |
I flew twice today. The first time things went really pretty darn good. Only the tail twitching was the main problem.
. . .
Which means that I still haven't solved the damn twitching!.
I've decided that the crazy precessing problem I identified above, is actually caused by me. As it spools up, at some point I start to
give it right aileron, and the SK360 tries to make the heli tip to the right, but if it's not light enough, it cant, so it really
fights to make it happen, and that's the jumpiness. If I just wait until it's a lot closer to liftoff, the jumps dont happen.
The second flight was a little crazy tho. Basically it started up with the bouncing. I've grown able to more precisely control it,
and I am quite certain that on its own, it does this bouncing. Today, I'm still working on sorting out how to takeoff straight up,
and trying to master the finesse to get the tip to the right at the right time and right amount, and I try to just get it up on the tip
of the rt skid, and hold it there. But after a few seconds, it'll just start jumping up and down. so I dont touch the collective,
and it goes about 6-8" in the air and then drops to the ground, and then bounces back up. About ever second or so, and it'll keep this
up I think as long as I'll allow it to stay in the air. bounce bounce bounce. The thing is sometimes it comes down a little harder
and actually will put both skids completely on the ground, meaning it is forced to tip left, which causes the disc to tip forward
and when it comes up it springs forward. Anyway, long story short, between the boucing and tail twitching, it's pretty exciting.
I just hafta prove whether or not the SK360 is the source of this problem - waiting for the replacement rotor head to come in.
Finally got the parts in so I can convert back to flybar.
. . .
I've been just flying as much as I can, putting up with the bounce and other issues. But now I can finally see if some of my ideas about
how things work will actually pan out. Here's what I want to find out:
will the bounce stop with the flybar
will the tail twitching stop
will the heli quit it's wandering off tendency
I've felt the heli was sort of jerky around center collective - will that improve?
will I be able to get rid of that last little bit of vibration?
Conversion to flybar done
. . .
I really enjoy working on the heli.
Ended up replacing the main shaft bearings - they were a little loose. Also replaced the tail rotor shaft and bearings. I wouldn't say that
there was anything wrong with them, but parts cost about $20, and it just seemed smart. I also installed a grounding strap to connect the
tail boom to the R & L side metal body frame.
I have the manual that comes w/ the heli - found it online, and followed instructions very closely about the lengths of control rods for swash
& rotor head; took my time making sure the bare rotor mast spun freely, that the freewheeling clutch worked smoothly, then hooked up the tail rotor
and made sure that whole business was smooth to my fingers; adjusted the tension on the belt w/ my calipers. Then hooked up the battery and spun the whole deal without swash just to make sure there
were no vibrations. Put the swash on and leveled it at center stick as best I could - I just have dinky bubble levels. Then worked at leveling it
at 0 and 100% collective - this revealed a binding linkage on the L servo. Fixed that so that the swash and all linkages move as equally as I can
tell. Installed the new head and trimmed per the manual - without really any difficulty.
I kept the destroyed blades from my first big crash, but cut them down so that they're about 6" long, and balanced them. So I used them to do the
trimming, and once trimmed, spun the whole deal up checking for vibrations - looked pretty good.
Initial spin ups to sort out blade tracking - only off 1/2 twist - nice! Initial flight a welcome sense of familiarity. The bounce is gone. No tail
twitching on the first couple of flights. Wandering off is pretty much gone. Heli is smooth on the collective. Vibration gone.
So this was a flaming !!success!!
Beginner mods to the machine are !!really!! helpful
. . .
On setup, it turns out that this Raptor has several adjustments especially for beginners: the washout transfer arm has an inner and outer hole
for the linkage ball, the inner is for beginners - a heli less responsive to the cyclic; and it comes with heavier and lighter flybar paddles - the
heavier are also for beginners and for folks who want a smoother type of response. So I took both of these options. I also have learned that
in general, adding weight to the ends of the flybar will slow it's response down, so I also added some weights on the flybar, but put them right
next to the hub. I wanted to see what effect the heavier paddles would have, and I'd be able to add in my extra weights easily if I decided that
I wanted to do that.
With this setup, the first 2 flights were a little bit of a surprise - I had to use really *big* cyclic to get a response - big as in 1/2 stick
or so to correct movement, but it would gracefully respond when I finally gave it enough. After the second flight I decided that that was too much
of a good thing, so I moved the linkage ball out to the outer hole.
This was a major improvement. It was still predictable and responsive in a way that I liked. Not jerkey, and not over-responsive. By the end of
the flight after this adjustment, I'd completely removed the expo from both cyclic channels, and was very pleased with the responsiveness of the
machine.
I feel like I keep coming back to this business of doing as much as you can to make the machine so that *you* can fly it.
Initially I was all focused on the pitch/throttle curves, and that helped, as did tweaking the expo and D/R throws, and I was all excited about
those improvements when I implemented them, but *now*, finally, I'm definitely over the big hurdle.
Somewhere else on this site I talk about being able to use 4 controls simultaneously - and that until now I've been working pretty exclusively with the
cyclic - just 2 of the controls. With great difficulty and concentration I could swing the tail one way or the other, but you'd hardly call that
using the 3 controls together - and totally forget about collective - there wasnt enough mental bandwidth to process all 4.
And where this rambling goes is now, finally, after nearly 20 hours of "flying" the machine, I am meaningfully able to use and work on all 4
controls simultaneously. And this is due primarily to the flybar weights. Secondarily to the pitch/throttle changes.
Before, I was literally overwhelmed trying to master the cyclic - the machine was, for me, hyper-responsive, and it literally took all that I had
to keep it from crashing. Now, with the responsiveness moderated, I am totally fine flying with both thumbs fully engaged. I'm simultaneously
working on keeping the tail lined out, holding some specific height, and staying over a spot. Mind you, not that I'm good at it, but I'm at last
working on all 4 controls.
I'm so stoked!!!
Suspicion about the twitching and other anomolies and outside temperature
. . .
I've been having a suspicion that part of the tail twitch and the silly slow wiggle I see occasionally has to do with temperature.
I've noticed some discussion about temperature sensitivity of the heading gyro, and I'm pretty convinced that part of the deal with the
twitching has to do with temperature change. For a while I would take the heli outside for 30 min or so to come to temp. before flying,
but now I'm just going straight outside and flying, and what I see is that there is sometimes a twitch, and it happens shortly after I start
flying, and only lasts a few seconds. I'm totally convinced this is the gyro going through some sort of temperature-induced change.
Right now the temps here are around 40 outside, so it's going from about 65 inside to 40 outside. When it was colder, the twitches would
last longer usually.
The other problem I have been having is frequently, right when I start flying, it'll show a really slow vibration - on the order of 10-50
cycles per second - so really slow. the whole machine rocks from side to side. This will last a short while - maybee as long as 30 seconds,
and then will disappear. This too, I'm pretty sure, is a temperature thing - about the main shaft bearings. They're new, and nicely greased.
So when I go outside, the grease immediately starts to harden, but the rotor is spinning, trying to warm them up, and the bearings kinda fight
with the shaft, which probably slips occasionally, until the bearings are up to working temperature.
Just glowing
. . .
It's so much fun now. Every flight is one long hover practice. I bring it up 6", hold there, swing the tail to the R, hold there, back to centeer,
hold there, to the L, hold there, back to center, down for a touch & go, then take a nice steady climb up to 8' or so, hold there, back down to 1',
etc. Not that this is all flawless - I've still got a long ways to go, but at least I feel like I'm actually fully flying the machine now.
Am thinking about reducing the weight of the paddles a little - not in a big hurry to do this, but I'm getting close to doing that.
More info about temperature
. . .
Yep - I'm totally convinced. Same behaviors today, from 65 inside to 42 outside, a few twitches early on, and the slow wiggle for a short while.
The second flight I just kept on flying and the wiggle disappeared after about 30 seconds.
Am really focusing on the in-place hover - at one height, over one spot. I can see that its getting better with each flight, just ever so
slowly.
Hover finally beginning to come together
. . .
It's beginning to feel like I'm actually accomplishing the hover. I can hold it in space in one spot for, sometimes, 30-45 seconds, and the
slipping around and falling off the dime go slower and not so far.
To mix things up I've been trying to focus mostly on static hover, but I loose concentration sometimes, so I mix it up by swinging the tail to the other
side for a while, and by practincing takeoff/landings, and by doing hovers at 10' or so - that also takes some getting used to.
So I'm going to start working on nose-in takeoffs now.
Note that now I'm at a total of about 27 hours flying the E600, and am only now starting to feel comfortable at the hover. I have enough extra mental
bandwidth that I can relax my shoulders and arms and relax my body some, can adjust the transmitter in my hands and make sure my fingers and thumbs are
relaxed. And I want to re-emphasize that I'm actually flying all 4 controls now, since 8 Feb 2009, which represents over 7 hrs of flight time.
This means to me that the beginner mods I've made on the heli and in the transmitter are *really* helping.
More pitch/throttle ideas today
. . .
The hover is coming along pretty well. The heli is now quite stable and quiet in the air, and with the quietness and stability came a substantial
reduction in it's tendency to pump up and down. It still does this, but less often and quite a bit slower.
I've been able to actually use the collective since the 8th, and have begun to feel that the P/T curves weren't quite as helpful as i'd like.
What I noticed was that I felt I could actually feel when the stick was going over the knee at the 75% of stick position. So I decided I needed
to tweak them so that both were linear starting at the 50% position. So below are the 3 sets of curves, from mid-Jan, early Feb, and today.
You need to look closely to see the changes in the pitch curves, but you'll see that on the 8th I was *hot*!! and just bent it right back up so that
it darn near went straight to 100%. And now it's back down substantially, since I'm straightening out the throttle curve - will fly this setup
tomorrow, and I'm going to start with a setup that I think is a little cautious.
The big change in the throttle curve is this last adjustment, taking the knee at 75% out, so it goes up in bumps of 3 from 55%.
The other info is that yesterday I replaced the flap dampers with stiffer ones. In some blog, I found someone claiming that sometimes a
slow vibration (that sounded like the one thought was temperature related) can be caused by soft flap dampers. My heli comes with "beginner"
and "advanced" flap dampers - the advanced ones are just harder than the beginner ones, so I replaced them.
The result is that the heli is some - not a lot, but definitely some - quicker, sharper in how it responds.
Once I realized that there was a difference, I seem to be making some great progress, just since the flight after I had changed them.
One final comment - if you notice the D/R and Expo settings - they changed on the 8th also - I just felt so much more secure w/ the machine.
The 110% is an attempt to sharpen the response in the collective - I'm beginning to feel that it's too easy, and will likely change to the
lighter flybar paddles with weights fairly soon.
Started work on nose-in . . .
Am pretty much just doing RADD all over again. Starting out w/ the heli skids on the deck, make them as light as I can and still keep the
machine in control. Latest flight was pretty consistent and was just touching the tip of the R skid most of the time - will probably start
adding in short periods of actual off-the-ground next flight.
The inevitable crash . . .
I kinda feel like this was inevitable - especially given the numerous crashes I had when I started nose-in on the simulator. But I made some
really good progress - was actually starting to work on putting the tail at +- 45deg from nose-in. One of the little things I tried to notice
was when or how often I had a bad reflex - as in give the wrong stick for the situation. This got to be pretty good - only a very small number
per flight, but they always seemed to continue happening. And this was the cause of the crash. It was time to land, but the heli was about 5'
to the right of where I wanted to set it down, and slipping more to the R, so I intended to correct, but did the opposite, so it really scooted,
and there was a tree right there.
Both blades destroyed, the tail boom and rotor cage also gone. bent main shaft & feathering spindle - about $150 in damage.
Waiting for parts now - will resume w/ the simulator.
Thoughts about trim for the newbie . . .
I've been trying to really understand the cyclic trims - flybar, D/R and expo. What they do and how they affect the machine and how they affect
the pilot.
The short story is that I still feel that weight on the flybar is the first and best correction to make. And that, together with expo probably will
be enough for even the most ham-fisted of us (newbies). But if that's not enough, then some judicious D/R will also help quite a bit.
Here's why I say this:
- Flybar
- You need to read about this on your own for a better explanation, but basically, I understand the flybar to have been added to RC helis in
order to tame them - to make them less sensitive to control inputs. This is accomplished by moderating the control -> pitch response by inserting
the flywheel with wings, and adding mechanical leverage reduction. The control input needs to *mostly* affect the flybar before the input is
directed to the blades. The effect of this to you, the pilot is a very nice smoothing out of the response of the blades to your stick movement.
For example, if, without flybar, your 1 deg. input goes to the blades in 1/1000th of a second, it might take 10/1000ths or 50/1000s of a second
with the flybar in place, or possibly even longer (these are purely hypothetical examples!!). The blade will get to the full deflection you request,
it'll just take longer, and, as if that's not enough, the moderation is not linear, it's a nicely exponential curve with the most change happening
in the middle of the move, and progressively less change happening at the ends of the time window. So you get a really nice-feeling response.
And you will experince this as a very nice stress relief - the machine *will* respond to you fully, it is just not so frantic to respond, so your
brain will have a little more time to process everything that's happening.
And, not only will the blades respond fully, but you get the full range of movement - i.e. +- 10deg. (or whatever your machine does). It just takes
a little longer to get there.
- D/R
- The D/R function on your transmitter will also seem to tame the beast. But it works by reducing the total pitch range of the blades.
So, for example, if you normally have a +- 10deg throw, and you set your D/R at 50%, you'll actually have a +- 5deg throw.
And I can report that reducing the pitch range with D/R also provides a nice stress relief. The difference between this and the flybar weights seemed to
me to be subtle, but I felt that there *definitely* is a difference. And that would be due to the operation of the mechanism. The flybar weights
work to increase the resistance to change that is already present in the flybar. The D/R just diminishes the amount of blade twist (pitch change)
for x input. So lets say that you give 25% right stick. Flybar will get you to +2.5deg pitch, it'll just take a little longer. D/R will also seem
nicer, but it's because the 25% stick only produces 1.25 deg pitch change. In fact, w/ the D/R at 50%, you'll need to give 50% stick to get the 2.5deg.
pitch change, but if you ask for it, you'll get it plenty quick.
And this is the danger lurking in large D/R - that you might not be able to give the machine the pitch deflection it needs to right it from some
situation because you've limited in an absolute way, the amount of pitch change you can request from the cyclic.
- Expo
- I've explained the effect of the expo here. I just really like the way adding a little expo also seems
to tame the machine. The expo is nice in that, unlike the D/R, you can still get the full pitch movement from your blades if you ask. The non-linear
character of the response curve also seems to more naturally give the response you're looking for: small stick, small response (for when the simple
linear response is still too much for your brain to handle)
So to go back to my initial approach here, if you just feel that the heli is *too* responsive, then go after the flybar - add some weights. Try one pair
of weights, and if that's still not enough help, try a second pair. When the responsiveness is more to your liking, then you can further tweak it with expo.
I dont know what an "acceptable" expo is. From my reading, it sounds like the real studs go with no expo or just the least possible, but a couple of weeks
ago I was watching a DVD about some really famous 3D airplane guy - he went through the setup of his plane and how he had the transmitter setup for it, and
he had -90% expo for on the rudder and elevator for his 3D flying - he said he did that to keep the tail from being too sensitive in the small movements. I dunno
but that seems like a lot - when you ever get the stick over to about 90% or so, then you'll be getting really a *lot* of response from very little stick.
So my thinking is I'm not going to blindly follow what the studs do - it *hasta* work for me, so when I feel I need more expo, i'm going to try it.
Machine repaired . . .
Yep just a hair under $150 for the parts. Not a big deal putting stuff back together. I didn't fiddle w/ re-levelling the swash since in all my other crashes
it's not needed to be re-levelled, but this time I should have - it's taken major trim on the transmitter, so I'll spend some time some evening and straghten that
out.
Just before it actually hit the tree, I was able to shut the motor off completely. I think this might have saved the ESC and BEC - which together are pretty expensive.
I *believe* that this helped to reduce the damage, and I'm not exactly sure what might have happened to cause the servos to be so changed. One blade actually broke
hitting the tree. The other was damaged from that impact so possibly the torque on the linkage might have been too much, altho the servos seem to work fine.
Just working on hovering. . .
Since the crash, I've been flying as much as I can. Todate I've put in over 44 hrs, and 11 since the repair. This is all only about hovering.
For tail-in, I'm actually meaningfully using all 4 controls simultaneously, so focused on holding the heli over the X at a particular height and heading.
For nose-in, I'm using 3, still a little uncomfortable with mixing the cyclic in, as this adds substantial instability to the machine.
In the meantime, I've changed the settings on the transmitter, there is 0% expo on the cyclic now, and I'm very comfortable with that. Every now and then
I tweak the settings a little - gradually moving them towards what seems to be mainstream, and this has gone fine.
I've been pretty cowardly about flying (OK rotating) from tail-in to head-in - afraid I'd loose it. So I've been working flying a few seconds tail-in, then
landing, and with the blades still spinning strongly, rotating 180, take off in nose-in, back and forth, trying to get the transition done as quickly as possible.
This goes fairly well, so today I went to a big-ish field to try to do it in the air. Well, am I glad it was a big field, 'cause I would have crashed for
sure in my normal flying place - too tight. And I decided that I'm still not quite ready to do this. The heli was all over the place, and pretty high. For
some reason I had difficulty bringing it down undercontrol. It was a no-damage crash, so I lucked out.
So my thoughts about all of this are about flying in different orientations. It's not just nose-in or tail-in, it's tail-in, and +- 45 deg, and +- 90 deg, and the same for
nose-in, except I haven't graduated to nose-in +- 90 deg. yet. I've noticed that, when I'm flying tail-in, there's almost no thinking going on about which way
I should be moving the stick - it goes all pretty darn automatic and I dont make mistakes about which way to move it. I'm not real good at judging how far
to push it, so correcting from something is usually a little back and forth until I'm where I want to be.
For nose-in, I generally explicitly remind myself about flying the cyclic backwards, and then things work out pretty well. I notice every now and then
I make a mistake w/ the cyclic, but the mistakes are coming less and less often.
But flying all of these orientations is (at least for me) quite a bit harder than you might think. I actually think that the 90 deg is harder than nose-in.
I notice that I'm nowhere near as active w/ the collective in these orientations, and the machine flies much more wildly than at the 45 or 0 deg orientations.
And I think that next time I try to fly from tail- to nose-in, I'll go directly. Today I was trying to sneak up on it by first going to +90 and then the
remaining 90 a few seconds later - I think this made the transition muddled in my brain - anyway, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
The thing I can't quite wrap my brain around is, since I have a pretty clear and automatic sense about tail-in vs nose-in, at what point does the changeover
from the tail-in mode to the nose-in mode happen? So by swinging the full 180, I'm hoping that I'll just switch from the one to the other. But at some
point I'm going to need to deal with this question. My suspicion right now, is that at some point I'll be flying the cyclic always from the orientation
of the heli, not from my vantage point. I think this happens now some when I'm flying at +- 90, and that I'll know when I'm good at it when I can fly pretty
well in those orientations.
About crashes. . .
Right - so this means I crashed again. This time I was hovering nose in, a little gust of wind came up and lifted the machine way up (maybee 12' or so) so
I became disoriented and frazzled. I tried to save things, but the big control moves make the machine move around pretty quickly, and it's pretty
tight where I fly, so I finally got in too much of a bind and let it go sideways into the grass.
There are several lessons here that might help someone:
- First, I've mentally rehearsed closing the throttle when things get bad. I believe this reduces the severity of the damage considerably, since
all that's left is the speed of the machine, and the inertia that's in the blades. I did this this time, and I believe the only damage is one
of the main blades is cracked - need to replace them, but I think that'll be about 90% of the cost of repairs.
- Second, this hilights to me the importance of mastering the *basics*, meaning the hover: picking a spot in space and keeping the machine there,
fully there, in all orientations. I'm pretty good at that with tail-in hovers, and even tho my nose-in is pretty good (as long as I dont fiddle
w/ the collective), it's not a full hover. This was the specific problem this morning. Had I been working on including the collective in the
hover training, the little gust would have been no problem. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've flown tail-in in much worse gusts - no problem. The little
machine mostly goes up and down in the gusts, so significant collective needs to be applied, and I'm good with that tail-in, but not nose-in.
- Third, I've discovered that hovering proficiency needs to be mastered at several altitudes (at least): low - as in 1-2' above the ground, middle - as in
5-8' above the ground, and high, as in 12+' above the ground (or so). The machine flies differently when it's low vs the other 2 - so this is interesting.
And I've noticed that the higher the machine, the more disoriented I get, so it's just another skill that I need to teach myself (i.e. flying the machine
while looking at it from below).
Another *crash*!!!. . .
Crap!!! I've been really working on nose-in and tail-in hovers, and they're getting to be OK - not great
but at least OK. And I've been feeling that I should be able to stay in the air and transition between the 2 -
as in, rudder around 180deg. So today I went to a bigger field to fly, and tried it. Got around from nose-in
to tail-in, but became disoriented and flew the machine into the ground. Both blades, tail boom, feathering shaft
and paddle wire, so a pretty serious crash.
Yes, I *do* have a simulator, but I grew to really dislike it - I just felt that it didn't really help me
compared to just flying the machine, so I also pretty much forgot about it. Soooooo, after the crash, I
fired up the simulator, tried the same thing, and sure enough, got exactly the same crash! *but* after
trying the same move 3 more times, I finally was able to keep it together. I guess it'll be more simulator time
until the parts come in. And I'll try hard to remember the next time to use the simulator before trying
a new move with the machine.
Something else I've been trying to figure out, is how it works when you switch from tail-in to nose-in. For me,
these are 2 separate worlds. The cyclic is exactly reversed between these 2 - at least that's how I was able
to learn to fly nose-in - I just told myself to block what the machine was doing instead of take it where I wanted
it to go. And my worry was about at what time do I switch from "tail-in mode" to "nose-in mode"? I normally fly
tail-in and +- 90deg, and I do nose-in and +- 45deg.
How does that work I ask myself - I'm turning the machine from tail-in to nose-in, at what point do I change
from the one mode to the other?
But what I've noticed is that I rarely actually think about what I do with the cyclic (I still think about what
I do w/ the collective and rudder tho). It just happens by muscle memory.
So with the simulator, initially i'd try to swing the tail around pretty quickly - kinda hold my breath until I
was out of the gray zone and then start to fly the cyclic again. Once I got to the point that that worked pretty
good, I started slowing the tail down. And while it's far from good, I'm beginning to think that the whole
"orientation" business just goes away at some point
Parts arrived!!!. . .
Cool - starting to fly again. I've switched from the heavy flybar paddles to the medium weight paddles. The heavy ones weight 31g ea,
the medium are 6g, and since i'm a coward, I added a 1g weight.
This worked out pretty good. I added -10% expo and flying is going pretty darn good. The big surprise is that changing the paddle weights
affects not only control response, but just overall stability of the machine, meaning, that when little gusts push it around, it seems to be
affected more than before the change.
Another item: After all the time I spent on the simulator, it's a little scary flying again, because the one thing the simulator is not good
at is emulating the actual performance of the heli in actual air. In particular, in the simulator, the heli will hold an altitude extremely well.
I pretty much forget about the collective once it's in the air. But the actual machine is constantly moving up and down. This has a huge
impact on controlling the machine, since with the real machine I find that I'm pretty much forced to fly all 3 controls (cyclic, collective and rudder),
but with the simulator I can focus on just the cyclic.
Servo failure on takeoff. . .
I guess it had to happen. I'm using Futaba S3050 servos for the rotor, and this is the first failure, with 66.6 hrs
of flight time on it.
It happened immediately on takeoff - the machine was pretty crazy and I was struggling to understand what was happening,
so it went through some pretty crazy gyrations, but I managed an only somewhat hard landing, with no damage. Only the smoke
coming out of the one servo. Waiting for parts now.
About hovering orientation - if you go back to my journals of 27 april and 7 may
you'll read about me wondering about how important control in hovering orientation is and about how things operate when the machine
changes from nose-in to tail-in & vice versa.
The more I fly, the more convinced I am of the importance of mastering hovering - in *all* orientations - before seriously heading
off into forward flight. And I would also add to orientations - altitudes. It's an amazingly different thing when the machine is
10' up vs only 3' up. And I also think that as I progress, i'll also start changing the distance I am from the machine when I'm
hovering it.
After the big 24 May crash, there was a long wait for parts (mostly because of my unstaisfactory employment status). My kids
finally took pity on me and gave me some $$ for fathers day for heli parts (see - it *can* pay off having kids!!). But during
the long wait, I was working on the simulator. And I began explicitly working on orientation changes at the hover. This has evolved
into my current exercise/goal, I think of it as quarters. It goes like this:
- takeoff nose-in; hover within a 1 meter circle for at least 20 seconds continuously
- turn CCW 90 deg; hover within a 1 meter circle for at least 20 seconds continuously
- turn CCW 90 deg (you are now tail-in); hover within a 1 meter circle for at least 20 seconds continuously
- turn CCW 90 deg; hover within a 1 meter circle for at least 20 seconds continuously
- turn CCW 90 deg (you are now nose-in again); hover within a 1 meter circle for at least 20 seconds continuously
- turn CW 90 deg; hover within a 1 meter circle for at least 20 seconds continuously
- turn CW 90 deg (you are now tail-in again); hover within a 1 meter circle for at least 20 seconds continuously
- turn CW 90 deg; hover within a 1 meter circle for at least 20 seconds continuously
- turn CW 90 deg (you are now nose-in again); hover within a 1 meter circle for at least 20 seconds continuously
Or, to say it another way, go 1 full turn to CCW, stopping at each 90 degrees, and not leaving that orientation until you've
hovered over the target continuously for 20 seconds; and then go back CW to the starting position in the same manner. And then do the whole deal one
more time.
I have a countdown timer set for 15 minutes with the simulator (otherwise I'll just sit there for hours) and several times I've actually
completed this exercise within the 15 minutes.
But probably the biggest surprise for me is that the 2 sideways orientations are *substantially* harder to hold in hover than even nose-in!
I think this is because for the other 2, the tail gives your eyes a better idea of how much movement you're asking for w/ the cyclic.
The other question - about how my mind handles the changeover between nose-in and tail-in. The jury is still out on this. I find that I can
actively switch between thinking nose-in and tail-in when the heli is sideways, and in making these mental switches, I've also discovered that
the movement I would make with the cyclic is the same - which stands to reason. But it was kind of a surprise to me at first.
I notice that nose-in +- 45deg is pretty solidly a nose-in orientation, and when I swing from nose-in to 90deg - sideways, I tend to keep the nose-in
thought in my head, and will then intentionally switch to tail-in - which seems to fly better in this orientation.
But I just have a suspicion that the real answer is that I need to move from my current mode of thought, to one that just has me in the pilot's seat
in the machine. I think that the actual mental progression i've made so far is:
- machine orientation relative to my torso
This was about not only the orientation of the machine, but where my torso was facing - I had to do all my flying facing a particular direction,
and same for the heli.
- machine orientation relative to my location
With this change, I could have my torso and even head facing any direction (altho mostly facing the machine) and I think about the orientation
of the heli relative to my location, not relative to where i'm facing.
- and I think the next progression needs to be just head inside the machine
Continuing the thread from the 16 july post about simulator vs machine, I use the Real Flight simulator, and I've discovered that I can setup some
air conditions that start to do a pretty good job of emulating the kinds of things I actually experience while flying. So my current plan is to continue
to focus on the exercise above without air, and when that begins to be pretty consistent, i'll add in the air and then start all over, trying to master it while
focusing on the 2 controls (cyclic & collective).
Replaced the second servo. . .
Flying again after the long dry spell - I turned in quite a few simulator hours: Able to do my quarters exercise in under 10
minutes several times; Noticed that the first (simulator) flight of the day is a little rocky generally, the second and third pretty good, and the
evening flight not so good; actually tried some upside-down flying - pretty crazy!; also tried to do more of the IRCHA level 1
test elements (in the simulator) - I've got a ways to go before I can take that test.
And now flying again, doing the same quarters exercise w/ the machine. Like I said above, actually flying pretty much forces
me to use all 3 controls, where I can easily get away w/ just cyclic on the simulator.
Right now, flying involves 1 quarters circuit, then move the machine to the R & left & hover over something, then move farther
R & L and hover, and that's about it for the battery.
Since I'm progressing so slowly, I have lots of time to think about what I'm doing, so, here are some more thoughts:
Focus is important - as in focusing on the machine while it's in the air.
Attention - as in paying attention to the machine. Registering and responding to it as it moves in the air - this requires focus.
And I believe this is a skill that I'm having to force myself to learn. I, ever-so-slowly was able to register and respond with the
cyclic as the heli slid around the sky. Now that I also care about it's altitude and orientation, I'm finding that I need to actively force myself to
focus and register *all* movements of the machine of *any* kind in *any* direction, and if I don't, I seem to be able to perfectly happily ignore
how it just sailed up 2 or 3 feet, or swooped down and nearly touched the ground, and that the tail is now nearly 45deg to the left.
I'm just flabbergasted that I can be "focused" on the machine and not react to these movements, but that's what I notice happening, and
I also see the effort that I need to make to force myself to react to all of the movements.
And I just glanced back in the journal to about 6 months ago - I was in the throes of learning to fly nose-in. That is so passe
now! - nose in is just a big yawn! (OK - well mostly just a big yawn) Cripes! - I can spin the machine pretty much any direction without a problem.
I also read about my mind being overwhelmed by the machine. Not anymore! - well, not often anymore. I feel pretty darn comfortable flying all 3 controls
and when I make a mistake, I have the mental bandwidth to recognize it and correct it before it turns into a crash - well, most of the time anyway. (and
understanding that I'm still pretty much all about hovering)
Actually flying now - (I think). . .
I've been diligently working on those spins I describe above - every single flight - the same exercise. Over and over. But it finally started
to get boring, so I got out the IRHCA Level 1 PPP exam description, and decided to work on that for a while. I can do the whole test, but mostly
it's probably not even quite passable - still too much wandering in the machine (i.e., in *me*). But there is this one part of the test, where
you have it do a tail-in circle around you to the R and L. I think this was finally the exercise that forced me to actively and consistently
use all 4 controls.
Mind you, I still have a long ways to go, but I can almost see progress from flight to flight. Before it was from month to month that I could
see progress. Since I started these exercises, things have tightened up substantially, and I'm pretty sure it's because I really cant get away
with 3 out of 4. Maintaining the altitude, maintaining the tail-in, and sliding smoothly to the L or R actually involves all 4 controls.
And I think that's the magic. Performing something with the machine that forced me to actively use all 4 controls. Before that, with the
hovering exercise, I could pretty easily switch between using the rudder or the collective, but no longer.
And now I can watch the machine and I'm really getting smaller and more relaxed about corrections, so that the machine looks more and more
stable every time I fly - how cool is that!!! And now the sobering info. It took me 33 hrs on the simulator (doing these exercises), and
about 60 hrs flying (just doing these exercises) (this is not guessing, this is actual recorded time) - I'm in it for the long haul I suppose.
Still flying, and had a battery explode . . .
Things have been going quite well - only 1 crash this last year - in July. That was when I got a little turned around trying to land the heli
nose-in, it was going side-to-side and I lost it and pushed it over - just blade damage.
Otherwise, I've generally been progressing. For about 6 months, I was out in the pasture, focusing on the IRHCA level 1 exam. Flying the squares,
the circles, the hover, etc. In Feb, I started using one of the 2 new batteries I got. They are those chinese Turnigy batteries - cost about $50 ea before
shipping (from China!). So I changed my routine some. I really liked the big tail-in circle and I felt I still need to keep working on the hover,
so I'd use the old battery for 7 min on the hover practice, and then the new battery for 12 min on the big circle. In July I started using the second
new battery, so I just used it to start working on flying figure 8's.
So about August, I finally got bored with this and went back to strict hover practice. I just sit in a chair on the deck and fly over our little square
concrete patio, and I have a little carpet square for the target. 6 minutes on the old battery noce-in, 12 minutes on new A on the right side, and then 12
minutes on the left side - just up in the air and hover the whole time. I'd love to say that my hover is spectacular now, but it's not. But when its
dead calm, I can do pretty good.
Just last week I changed again, now I'm practicing hover/touch&go landings.
I can say where last oct, I thought I was using all 4 controls, I wasn't really fully using them. Now, finally, with all that time hovering, I
actually leave my thumb on the collective stick and am actually moving it constantly and independently of the cyclic. When the air is still, the heli
is fairly (but not perfectly) stable vertically, and so I make really extremely small collective adjustments, and for some reason, then the cyclic
movements can also be quite small. But when there is any air, the machine can move vertically quite far and quite fast, so the collective adjustments
need to be rather big. For some reason this makes the cyclic adjustments quite large too - it's almost like the machine changes attitude just because
it's gyrating vertically, and the attitude changes are accentuated by the vertical movement, so it all seems a little frantic sometimes. But I persist.
I just believe that it's really all about muscle memory. Training the eyes to see every movement the machine makes and having the thumbs just do what
they need to. So it's really one long stare - trying really hard to notice movement earlier so that the correction happens sooner and can be smaller.
I think that the hardest movement to notice is when it moves directly away or directly towards me - this is regardless of tail position. so whatever
it's orientation to me, I can keep it pretty well stable in a Right-to-Left sense, but in the Towards/Away sense, it always seems like the corrections
need to be bigger and the gyrations bigger. Vertical position is still far from good. The machine seems to be both extremely sensitive to moves of the
collective, and also extremely sensitive to even the slightest air movement. Add to this whatever inertia that machine builds up as it goes up or down,
and it's pretty hard to know how to correct for any given movement - very easy to over or under-correct.
Right and the other big news is that the first Turnigy battery I was using, I called it battery A, exploded without warning on Sept 23. It was the charge
after it's 60th flight. I diligently keep a charge log, and there was no indication to me in performance or in the numbers that there was anything going
on with the battery. I had checked it after 73 minutes and life was good. The next time I went out to check, the place reeked of electrical smoke,
the shelf that it was on had been charred in about 1/2", and I felt pretty sumg to myself that I had been doing the charging on a thick piece of cottonwood.
That stuff wont burn even when you put an oxyacetylene torch on it. But the battery had gotten hot enough long enough to thoroughly char the wood nearly
a full centimeter.
The pictures below show my charging setup with the exploded battery, and the second is just the exploded battery - you can see that it was the cell on one
end that exploded.
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So - let that be a lesson - make darn sure your charging area is not flammable and can stand a little explosion. When I started out, I just charged the
the battery in the house, on a board, but next to some papers and cloth. The house probably would have gone up in flames if I were still using that.
Back to more focus on just hover . . .
I did the touchdowns for several weeks - hovering at about 6', and, for each orientation, touching down twice, then turning
90 to the next orientation. This was really good to force me to even more clearly separate the thumbs, and start to get
the collective thumb to be able to both turn the heli and move up or down under control.
Then last week, felt that the hovering was getting sloppy, or at least needed to be much tighter, so I switched
to a very low hover - at about 6". The idea was to force myself to really get a great rock solid clean hover.
And I can say that it has been revealing to be working on this. At this height, movement of the heli in any direction
is more apparent, and the amount of control input is also very apparent, so it's easier to see when I'm applying too
much input, and when I'm late in applying it.
And, from this low altitude, I also do touch downs, but since I'm so close, I feel like I can really insist on
a good straight, square down and up. None of this sloppy side-slipping and skidding touchdowns. They hafta be
just plain square and nicely in control. From this low altitude, this is more attainable for me. And also, the
quarter-turns from one orientation to the next can be more precise and steady.
Still hovering (bad winter), but *major* unexpected progress . . .
The winter has been really bad - lots of rain, and too much wind. But recently the weather has been turning, so I could
sneak out and fly more. And since, right now, my space is limited, it's still focusing on hover, which is OK with me. I
really feel that having a respectable hover is a big deal.
So - what does "respectable hover" mean to me? It means, pick a part of the heli, like the mast head, and work at keeping
that part of the machine inside a 1' diameter sphere in space. With small control inputs and generally only slow wandering
inside of that space.
And the reality is that I've been doing more like a 1 meter dia. sphere, with pretty consistently large control inputs and the
machine will frequently drift off pretty quickly. So one day I was thinking too myself (I call this "chatter" - my brain chatters
to me about stuff), and my chatter started wondering if i could fly any better if I could shut the darn chatter up!
I'm pretty convinced that flying (well, hovering anyway) is mostly a left-brain activity, which is all about the here and now and about the senses that feed
into the brain right here and now, and responding to those. I know there is probably sufficient bandwidth in a brain to have the
chatter and have the left-brain working, but I just wondered. So I tried it 2 days ago. (I'll talk about turning the chatter off
in a while.) And the result was nothing short of spectacular! I was in my target 1' sphere much more than not, and before this I have
been, (generously put) rarely in anything close to a 1' sphere. The machine was
drifting quietly and my control inputs were small and there were fewer of them.
I still need to do this several more times to see if it was just a fluke, but right now I think I'm on to something!
And about that shutting the chatter down - it's actually more like managing it than controlling it, and I've been working on this
for about 2.5 years now. Basically, started out with the goal of having a quiet mind for 10 breaths. This was extremely difficult, and actually
unattainable for me for a long time. But persistence pays. I can now with little effort quiet my mind for whole minutes. It's not totally still in
there, but the level of chatter is down to probably less than 5% of what it was, and this chatter is easy to quiet when I notice it.
And being able to do this as needed is a huge relief for me. I can do it when I notice that the chatter is becoming aggressive - basically
just stop thinking those negative thoughts, and all of the emotions and feelings that comes with them dissapates almost immediately. Talk about
a nice quality-of-life fix!
Anyway - that's my discovery.
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