Assembled frames with engine.

Servos installed.

Pitch servo installation. Notice the aluminium servo plates are mounted behind the servo to push it out from the frames to prevent binding.

The fuel system all plumbed up.

MPII installed.

Building the Raptor 90 SE
Simon Lockington

Rotorhead:
The rotorhead is where Thunder Tiger have really gone to town. This thing is very heavily engineered to the point of nearly being excessive. The metal blade grips look like they belong as hinges on a safe at Fort Knox and the center hub is equally robustly engineered.

The head uses a teetering spindle that centrally pivots on two large bearings in the head. Having only flown fully floating axle heads in the past it will be interesting to see if there is any discernable difference.

Two kinds of dampeners are provided with the kit, hard (70 durometer) and really hard (80 durometer), along with a good number of shims to allow fine tuning to your taste.

Also provided is the ability to choose between two flybar ratios. However to use the lower ratio you must order different (shorter) seesaw arms.

The paddles provided with the kit look very stable and are secured to the flybar with set screws.

Also a nice touch is an adjustable phasing ring so that you can fine tune the aerobatics performance to reduce any unwanted cyclic interaction.

Tail Assembly:
The Raptor drives it's tail via a split gear arrangement driving a torque tube down to the tail gear box.

The tail box is a very simple affair to assemble, it has to be right up there with the Sylphide in terms of simplicity infact! The only issue I had here was the brass insert that is threaded into the tail rotor pitch slider. This component was a bit tight to thread and I managed to just slightly deform the brass insert. This was fixed by running a drill bit up through the hole and 'honing' the area out. This and a bit of Tri-Flow to lubricate the shaft soon brought things right again.

The next area of difficulty was in trying to insert the torque tube with it's bearing guides into the carbon boom! He bearing guides are made of plastic and the ridges are designed to be fairly flexible so as to push into the boom, but once there, hold their position. The problem was the ridges were pretty damn stiff and I couldn't get them into the boom until they were heated up then compressed enough to push into the boom. The manual states that some kind of flexible adhesive be used to secure the guides in the boom, but I assure you, those damn things are not going anywhere once you get them in!

The tail rotor control rod is aluminium and threaded through four guides. The holes in the guides however were a bit tight for my liking so I slightly enlarged them with a drill bit to get a nice free flowing action. The tail servo is rear mounted on the boom mount.

The boom is very securely fastened to the helicopter via a very tight fitting boom clamp at the front and a good boom support clamp. The boom is slotted so it just fits in one way and no re-meshing of the tail bevel gear with the maingear is required each time you remove the boom which is nice.

Setup:
This machine contains Futaba 9252's on the cyclic and throttle controls, a GY601 and a Futaba 9350 on the collective.

Setting up the Raptor is very straight forward. Installing the servos is very easy as there are no tricky areas where you need tweezers and doctor's fingers to complete the job. The servos are held in place by aluminium plates that are screwed down over the servo mounts. A very nice touch.

With it being a mechanical mixing machine it is easy to get all the control rod geometry correct. The only issue I encountered was setting up the collective control. The servo output arm was binding on the plastic ridge above the servo and the throttle servo below. This was solved by putting the metal servo fastening plates that come with the kit behind the servo to push it out from the frames a couple of millimetres. This fixed this issue.

The only other issue I had was installing the large Futaba heavy duty switch. The stock switch location means that if you're going to install this switch, you have to push it right up against the frame in order to have enough space for it to work correctly. Not sure if I'm overly rapt with this, but we'll see.

The rather small radio tray means you can be as lazy with mounting the radio gear as you can be with say a JR machine, but does not present a problem.

Plumbing up the fuel system was very straight forward. The fuel tank comes pre-assembled and has three outlets/inlets as standard. This means no further drilling or other work required to install the OS 91 PS engine. I simply routed the muffler pressure line to the top nipple at the back of the tank and the carburettor return line to the bottom nipple at the front of the tank. I was concerned that this might induce air bubbles or other disturbances into the tank, but it does not appear to have so far.

The SAB 710 blades bolted straight on with no need for blade spacers.

As standard I was easily able to get 11 degrees each way which I am happy with.

INITIAL FLIGHT
Backyard hovering:
It was late Sunday afternoon before the big Rappy was finally ready for it's maiden run up flights. It was also hosing down with rain. However I was very keen to at least run the machine up to make sure everything was ok.

The OS 91 burst into life and sat their idling very nicely which was a great start. No untoward noises just yet! I set the hover throttle point at around 35% and the machine spooled up nicely without anything concerning happening so I lifted it off to see how it would hover. To my surprise the big Rappy just sat there a foot off the ground in the hover purring away nicely! Not even a click of trim was required!

I'd set the machine up for 3D and had thought it might be a bit squirrely in the hover, but this was definately not the case. It sat very stable. After a couple of minutes of hovering around I gave the collective a couple of quick jabs to see what the collective response was like and was somewhat shocked at the sudden, crisp response. It was easily as responsive as my Vigor CS. This was starting to get exciting!

SUMMARY
I was very impressed with this performance, this and my favourable impression of the machine on the whole has really got me thinking here. If the machine flies as well as I feel it will, why would you bother with high dollar machines? Whether it will fly as well as I think it will remains to be seen and I'll be reporting back on what I find once we get to work this beast out a little, but first impressions are very good.

If I was to buy a Raptor (and after this experience, it's not totally off the cards), it would be this machine. Whatever extra the SE costs over the normal Raptor is worth the dollars I feel. The head, which we all know is where the rubber meets the road just is not going to degrade like I feel the standard head might. Also, all the other parts on the thing are easy to work on and have the same legendary Raptor pricing attached to them which means if you smack the thing, it's not going to be the life stopping event that it would be if the CS ever went in bad.

I'm very excited about this machine and can't wait till it's run in a bit more so we can get busy with it and see what's really going on!

Tail boom attached and ready to go.	Tailbox.
Tail Servo mounting.	Canopy fitted.