This machine was purchased from Cyberheli.

The boxes ready to be unpacked.

Pinion block assembly.

Pinion and mainshaft block subassembly.

Beginning of frame assembly, note the thick aluminium frame stiffeners.

Assembling the tail drive. Very simple and effective.

Attached tail drive to the frames.

Fan shroud and engine mount attached.

Tail drive mounted.

Collective pitch rocker. Note that the front metal mount is installed upside down :(.

The Raptor has been to helicopters what the Model T Ford was to motor vehicles. It's bring the helicopter hobby to the masses with access to cheap kits and stunningly cheap spare parts.

I have always respected Raptors for being great value for money machines, but I didn't really put them in the same league as say my mighty Vigor, or the Fury etc.

At the end of April I had the pleasure of visiting the Szabo family's home flying field in Las Vegas, Nevada where I was able to witness some mind blowing flying by both Danny and Alan Szabo with their Raptor 90's. At the time, Alan was flying the now released Raptor 90 SE and Danny was flying a stock Raptor 90. Any concerns I might have had about the Raptor being a 'second tier' model were quickly dispelled after seeing these two guys beat the living crap out of their machines. I'm sure anyone who has seen these guys fly will know what I'm talking about.

I've never actually built a Raptor myself as I've always had JR machines and the Tempest FAI, so when the opportunity presented itself to build a new Raptor 90 SE I jumped at the chance to firstly build a Raptor and see what all the fuss was about, and see what the latest offering from Thunder Tiger was really like.

PRESENTATION:
The Raptor arrived packaged in a similar fashion to just about every other helicopter on the market, nothing special here. However I was somewhat surprised to see the instruction manual was very well presented with CNC diagrams and pretty good instructions. The manual was certainly better presented than the Tempest one and the illustrations were nearly as good as the JR ones. I had heard that Thunder Tiger instructions left a little to be desired, but I certainly didn't see this in this example.

All the parts for the Raptor are bagged up in sections as is normal with just about every helicopter I've seen. What was a bit different though was that in more than one case you had to open various different bags to assemble one bit. Whereas with the JR and Miniature Aircraft packs, you open a bag, assemble the contents, then move onto the next bag. It was at times a little frustrating having to ferret through the bags looking for a specific part to complete a section. Also, the instruction book didn't really indicate which bag to start looking in on many occasions.

ASSEMBLY:
Mainframes:
The Raptor mainframe assembly is made up of a large plastic core which contains the mainshaft bearings and servo rocker assembly. Threaded inserts are slid into the plastic housings onto which the carbon frame components bolt on. In this way, you manage to attain the benefits of plastic side frames (durability, survivability and cost efficiencies) with the benefits of using metal cross members which are a lot less likely to strip threads with use.

Bearings are press fit into plastic mouldings in the frames and there is little or no play at least when new. It will be interesting to see if play develops between the bearing and housing as time goes on.

The pinion bearings fit into the pinion block in the same way described above. I am a little concerned that in this particular instance the pinion could fret in the bearings, but we will see. The structure does seem strong though.

The carbon frames are bolted to the plastic core and have large, thick aluminium frame stiffeners are secured to the carbon frames by bolts and lock nuts to reinforce frame rigidity.

Everything does fit well together which I was a little surprised about given that is primarily a plastic machine. Everything fits and meshes together well.

Once the engine is installed, a carbon base plate is sandwiched between the bottom of the frame assembly and the landing skids.

Control System:
The servo rocker assembly is constructed from carbon and aluminium, which in my opinion is really the only way to go on a machine such as this. I would have been disappointed had this part been plastic as this section bears all the load of collective changes during flight.

There has obviously been a lot of thought put into the control rod geometry on the Raptor. The aileron servo sits within the servo rocker assembly which means it rises and falls with collective changes meaning no aileron interaction during collective operation. The elevator servo is mounted in the front servo tray and drives the elevator control level through an intermediary lever which is mounted on the pivot point of the rocker assembly. This takes out any interaction which would take place during collective movement if the lever was not present. The system works very well and is very easy to setup.
The system also allows crisp collective response even without the use of high powered, high cost digital servos. The geometry of the setup means that relatively small movements by the collective servo yield good movement at the swash plate. Therefore, if you do decide to install a good servo on collective, it is relatively easy to attain CCPM like collective performance.

Tail Drive:
The tail drive assembly is very well thought out. Bearings slot into the housings and the bevel pinion is pressed into the bearings the maingear take off drive that connects the autorotation gear with the tail drive bevel gear is secured to a shaft by roll pins which are then secured by a set screw which threads in from the end of the shaft. The mesh between the gears was great from the start and did not require any extra shimming. I was very impressed. With the two plastic half sections bolted together, the whole assembly is very strong.

Drive train:
The power plant for this machine is an OS 91 PS with a Muscle Pipe II. The gear ratios available to the Raptor SE are vast with three different pinion combinations and about four main gear combinations. Knowing that the OS 91 and MPII works well around the 8:1 area, we installed the pinion/main gear combination that yielded a 7.9:1 ratio. This means that the engine is pushed forward as far as the elongated slots in the engine mount allow though so gear mesh alignment is fairly critical. Available gear ratios range from 7.58:1 through to 9.5:1.

The clutch seems pretty good, while not half as big as a Sylphide clutch, it's about on par with a Vigor clutch for size.

The cooling fan is metal and is threaded onto the engine output shaft instead of being secured by collets which is the method I prefer. I would perhaps prefer the fan to be a plastic one, but performance wise it doesn't really matter.

The cooling shroud is pretty good with a baffle provided for those who want to use YS and other engines. This is provided because there would be too much of a gap between the top of the head and the wall of the shroud, whereas the OS engines fill the gap. This is a very nice touch and TT are to be commended on it I think.

The engines on Raptors are forward facing and therefore require a remote glow extension.

Aligning the primary drive components is pretty easy with elongated slots in the large aluminium frames to allow the engine mount to slide forward and back. The same is true for the pinion bearing block also.

The autorotation unit looks like a pretty heavy duty affair and is well constructed.

The mainshaft is secured in the helicopter by a collar secured to the shaft under the top bearing block and also at the bottom where the autorotation unit rests on the bottom bearing block. Although this works very well, this system relies on the fact that the holes in each and every mainshaft are going to be exact every time as there is no adjustment available in the mainshaft locking rings.

Page Two

Frames installed.	Pitch rocker assembly with control arms.
Mainshaft installed.	Swashplate and washout assembly.
Rotorhead assembled.	Choice of two flybar ratios available.
Very industrial blade grips!	Top view of rotorhead
Tail gear box assembly, very easy to put together.	Tail gear box assembled.
Tail pitch slider assembly.	Engine installed into frames.