11/25/03

The canopy comes with two colours for now: white and yellow. Personally I prefer yellow, because this colour is easy to see in the air. This canopy is designed for Raptor 30 and 50, and fit other 30, 50 as well.

When I receive the canopy, it is well packing  in a box, but there is no any instruction for how this canopy install to my Raptor 50. This really bags me, because this is my first installing an after-market canopy for my R50. After I success installing the canopy on my R50, I think it would be time to post my experience on my site, so people can use it as a reference when they get the same or similar canopy. The steps taken for installing the new canopy are described in the following. I also provide this page to Jet Hobbies Ltd to thank them give me this nice canopy; I am really appreciate it.

General Tips

1. Dremel is an perfect tool to drill or to cut.
2. Sand the place, where you drill or cut to prevent cracking, by 320 sand paper. (Someone says that CA can be a help if you apply it a little after drill or cut.
3. Pencil is nice tool to draw a line or to make a mark on the canopy.
4. Take progress slow.
5. When there is a need to drill a hole on canopy, I always drill a small one first and see the position needs to be corrected or not.
6. If you make a mistake when drilling a hole, 5 minutes epoxy can be a big help. Just clear the surface and apply a stick on outside of canopy. Than put enough amount of epoxy on inside of canopy where you drill a wrong hole. After the epoxy get dry, the canopy is strength as it was. 

I recommend to work on tail canopy first, and than to work on body part in order to get a better matching when putting two pieces on.

Mounting tail canopy

The tail is mounted by either the original canopy retaining post (BK0103) only or canopy retaining post and stabilizer fin (BK0069). The length of the tail depends on the size of your heli. As you can see, there are two marks on the tail canopy, which are for 30 size heli, but I will suggest that you put the tail canopy on the your tail boom and see where you should drill the two side holes (about 6 mm) on the tail canopy.

Apply a piece of silicone fuel tube (about 10 mm) on each canopy retaining post. The reason for doing this is prevent the contact between tail canopy and main rotor gears. Adjust the position of the fuel tube, so tail canopy will not touch the gears and later the body canopy can be put on.

Mounting body canopy

There is one thing important before mounting the body canopy on the heli. It is to check there is no any contact between the body canopy and any moving part on the heli, especially the pitch arm when you bring it to the full negative pitch position. The body canopy can be mount by two methods as I trying it, but I would recommend the second method. The second method take more work, but mounting is more secure.

1. Using 3 points mounting

What do I mean for 3-points mounting are two for the canopy retaining posts, which are used to mount the tail canopy as well, and the body clip (BK0098). Using the 3 points mounting is almost identical with the way the original canopy is mounted. The only thing needs to look at is the pitch arm may possible touch the body canopy when you bring your pitch to full low pitch. If this happens to you, you would simply move the canopy front up and than the problem will gone. I use a piece of balsa wood ( 50mm x 25mm x 9mm) to bring the head to a nice position. The way I mount it is showed in the photo below.

2. Using 4 points mounting

The difference between 4 points mounting and 3 points mounting is instead of using Body Clip (BK0098) to be the front support 4 points mounting using 2 canopy retaining post (BK0103) on each side of servo frame (BK0057) to mount the body canopy front. The mounting method require extra parts, which are listing in the following:

First, proper sizing two main frame spaces, so they can fit tightly into the holes on the two side of servo frame when you ham the spacers slightly.

Second, cutting out the potion of spacers that appear outside the servo frame and only leave about 1 to 3 mm outside the servo frame.

Third, insert the screw (M3 x 18) into the spacer and than attach canopy retaining post with a little thread-lock.

Fourth, drill two 6 mm hole on the relative position on the body canopy and apply rubber grommets on the holes.

Final Job

There are a few thing you may like to do before taking the heli out to fly. 

Test Fighting

With this canopy, the visibility is well improved while the heli is in the air doing some aerobatic flying. Generally because it seems larger than it was. In addition, it is almost the same weight as the plastic one, even this canopy has tail part. While flying in fast forward fight, the air speed is increased dramatically. I can not do a fast backward fight now , so I would not able to tell how it is in fast backward fight. Hopefully, I would be able to do it soon or find someone to get it a test.