HOWTO Wiki Routing the Servo Wires

From Heli-Wiki

I got this idea from BBrooks the site admin when I saw how he had routed the servo cables, and used spiral wrap to hold them in. I'm glad he came up with it and I came across it. Thanks!

I noticed when I was rebuilding my heli that the servo wires had really been crimped down on to keep them from falling into the main gear. As you can see in this pic, it dug so far through the insulation that it almost shorted out the servo.

Spiral Wrap at the Home Depot (Thanks Brooks for the find!). $2.25 for a 4' length of both 1/4" and 1/2" when I went to get it.

I wanted to route the servo wires through the shortest space possible without them interfering with something, or having the chance to get caught in something. I had also seen what BBrooks had done with his heli, and I really like the idea and wanted to use it. The only problem was that the bottom elevator servo was in the way for the spiral wrap to fit through. The whole tab doesn't really do anything on this heli, you just need a short portion of it to align it with the servo mount and hold it in place. Also I figured they sell cases for the servo's EFLRS752 for $3, so if I messed it up or needed the screw hole and the mounting bracket for later, I could just replace it.

I ended up using a pair of dikes to cut the tab off, and then shortened it a little more and smoothed it out with a razor blade.

When you are re arranging the wires it's a good idea to twist them (credits go to choppersrule of RCU and his 29 years experience in the telecom industry). Any wire that has electricity go through it creates an EM-field that goes around it. When you have electricity traveling in opposite directions, the two fields cancel each other out, getting rid of extra interference. It also helps reduce the sensitivity to external interference.

This is a pic of the mod all done. Make sure that you have enough clearance between the main gear and the new cabling, and that it can't come loose in hard flight and go down to the main gear and cause it to bind up and rip things apart. I used two zip ties to do this, and also made sure that the servo wires were not pushing the spiral wrap down. I kind of made a mess out of the servo wires wrapping them up and around themselves so they would stay put and not come loose in flight. It doesn't look too pretty, but it also helps reduce the cross talk and interference.

The wires will be harder to tell which servo they go to, but just plug them in one at a time in channel 1, 2 or 6 and arm the heli and move the controller around. The servo that moves is the one that the cord goes to. The front servo goes to channel 2, and then the rear servo's go in channel 1 and 6. Just make sure when you go left cyclic on the stick that the left servo moves down, and same with the right, and you should have it!

Also sometime in the future I might shorten the servo wires to get rid of some of that bundle. The only reason for not doing that is if you had to route them differently later, but in that case I am sure that you could just solder on some new lead wires.

mrasmm

PS feel free to PM me either on RCU or RCgroups if you have any questions or comments