Assembled main frames awaiting power module installation.

Frames with power module installed.

Servo tray installed (the wrong way).

YS 91 with fan assembly.

YS 91 with GV-1 sensor installed

Swashplate and washout assembly.

The head straight out of the box.

Building the Sylphide
Simon Lockington

Engine/Clutch/Fan:
Next is the engine assembly. As I said, in this case I was going to be installing the YS 91 engine and was going to be using a GV-1. This meant drilling and installing a magnet then balancing the fan.
True to form, the fan on the Sylphide is more of a tall, small configuration, than the short and wide configuration of the Vigor. It certainly does not look like it's going to be as powerful as the Vigor fan, but it is at least better than the Tempest.

With the magnet installed and the fan balanced, assembling the fan hub onto the engine is very straight forward and easy. As you'd expect, the fan is positioned on the engine drive shaft with collets.

The clutch on this machine is just plain huge. It makes the Vigor clutch look small and the Tempest one miniscule. Infact it looks like they just whipped it out of a pickup truck! It's bolted down to the fan hub from the top like the Voyager.

The engine is then slid into place into the power module. I had noticed that there wasn't a lot of clearance between the head of the OS 91 (with Viperhead) and the fan shroud, whereas with the YS, there is plenty of room. To the point where it may be advisable to introduce a block in the duct so that the air blows through the head rather than past it. Time will tell.

Rotorhead:
I have gotten used to the fact that most helicopter kits with pre-assembled heads do not have grease on the thrust bearings, so I always pull the heads down, grease the bearings and reassemble.
Also, the Sylphide comes stock with soft dampeners and I have since preferred the feel of the harder ones that also come with the kit so it was a good opportunity to do both jobs.
After I purchased my Sylphide I decided to disassemble my head to complete the above jobs and boy did I have a hell of a time trying to get the damn spindle bolts out! I swear, the guy who assembles these things at the factory empties half a bottle of loctite down the threads then uses a 1000 pound torque wrench to tighten the bolts up!
To take mine apart, I had to go buy a butane torch and hit the bolts with a little bit of heat, then put in an Allen key, attach a spanner on the end of that, stick a screwdriver through the spindle (the Sylphide has cutouts through the middle of the spindle shaft for the flybar pushrods) and summon all of the strength from everywhere in my body before finally the bolts cracked loose and I was able to get the damn thing apart. It was good to see the guy wasn't slacking on the job cause this Sylphide was just as hard to crack open! However obviously he'd decided he'd start greasing the thrust bearings now, cause they were nicely coated with grease. I changed the dampeners and reassembled the head.

The head has the flybar above the rotorblades and is highly adjustable. You can adjust flybar ratios and even the dampening to can be adjusted by turning the rings built into the head which compresses or decompresses the dampeners. You would think this is a great idea, but I'm not convinced. Trying to get both sides to have equal dampening can be difficult and let me tell you, rolls turn to crap if one side is uneven! Personally, I'd prefer to leave it how everyone else does it and use shims instead. I tried that, however the spindle shaft in the Sylphide is 9mm thick, the shims I had were only 8mm.

The paddles provided with the kit are pretty standard F3C paddles. They weigh about 36 grams and provide for two slots for the provided lead weights. For a while I've been flying with one strip of lead in the rear most hole, I actually feel I might remove that.

Assembling the swashplate and the washout assembly is a straight forward matter. What is different is that the Sylphide provides a phasing ring so that you can fine tune the phasing of the swashplate. For those who aren't aware of the term, phasing determines where in the head's rotation that certain cyclic commands are input. For example, if your phasing is out, when you pull a bit of back elevator, you may also be getting a bit of unwanted aileron control also. The Sylphide allows you to fine tune the phasing to diminish the amount of unwanted control on a given command. This is great, but if you don't set it up correctly the damn thing will NOT do aeros well!

The flybar setup is quite straight forward

Boom/Tail box:
The Sylphide has by far the easiest tail section to assemble that I've ever done. Much easier than the Vigor and a whole lot easier than the Tempest.
The tail hub is very robust and as you'd expect, very high quality.
The tailbox is secured to the carbon boom by a couple of set screws and a clamping bolt.

Both the vertical and horizontal fins are highly cut out, but you cover them with provided stickers to provide a very light, but sturdy 'flat' surface'.

The carbon boom supports have aluminium ends that are expoxied onto the carbon tubes. In turn, plastic ends are then bolted onto the aluminium ones and these are attached to the boom and the main frames.
However where the boom supports attach to the mainframes is an area that has been highlighted as a bit of a weakness. Three Sylphides in our area have broken the standoffs that the boom supports bolt onto so it may be a matter of time before this machine also breaks it's standoffs. We shall see.

The metal tail push rod is enclosed in a carbon tube which runs from the tail servo through the pushrod guides down the boom to the tail rotor pitch control. This provides a very free operation. I have noticed on my Sylphide though that the pushrod guides if not clamped down hard, can wear away at the carbon tube enclosing the pushrod. I have fixed this by using some clear shrink wrap at the points where the carbon tube comes into contact with the guides.

The boom attaches to the mainframes of the machine via a clamping system enclosed in the power module. It works very well. Attaching the boom isn't too much trouble.

Page Three