Mosquito Helicopter | Detailed Factory Tour | How It's Made | Engineering | Must Watch!

[Music] [Applause] [Music] all right for all you helicopter lovers out there this is the episode for you we're here in Trenton Florida interviewing with composite FX and that mosquito helicopter coming up next that's really it's like literally finger flying thank you to our channel sponsors wicks aircraft supply aviation youth publication and Aero adventure and fibia sea planes so my name is Norberto and i'm with composite effects and we build four different models of a small helicopter single-seat helicopter and as we split the mould this is what comes out of it this is kind of unmolested after that do you see we have some flash areas where the mold shuts so it comes out with the this gel coat already so these fixtures are level and square for the rest of the tooling that we're using and one of the first moves that will do is will poke a hole in the in the Tower of the Machine and put our first piece of metal in so this is an eighth wall four inch tube that gets bonded on the inside of the fuselage another assembly that comes from upstairs in the other building and that is the upper upper gear mantle reduction mouth and it is all tooled off of this initial piece of four inch tubing that that runs the mass so this whole assembly needs to run through so based on this datum we will take the cooling off and tool the rest of the components go on so this is essentially just a jig to be able to hold that in place while it sets up right and on the inside of the magazine you can see various reinforcements and crush zones that's that go underneath the operator unmanned machines we've built probably 40 or 50 of them and man machines were on approach to 400 so we know how to build helicopters we don't necessarily know what those applications are but lots of commercial applications are coming out oil and gas is using them power line inspection uses it agriculture there's there's package delivery any number of different things that these are being integrated into this is a tail boom straight out of the assembly fixture this one hasn't been massaged at all okay but this will go on to our assembly fixture there get trimmed and tooled such that it meets our fuselage repeatedly every every machine of ours has a bill cheap and this bill sheet guides us on how we need to prepare the machine and as it turns out this machine is a kit that's going to go to California doors are an option for the kit and there are a two-piece construction similar to the windscreens the plastic that makes up most of the door however these doors also happen to go into a fiberglass trim ring that holds their shape these are so these are not glued in yet but this gives you an idea of what this trim ring looks like so windshields are made with vacuum the doors we actually create this shape with pressure so we'll inflate the doors we suck down the windshields if we are going to do a factory assist or a factory build here at the facility we conventionally paint the machine and so this is an example of a body that we've that we started painting this is an Amanda fee and so typically it takes two people about one week in order to prepare this for paint and this will go into the booth get some epoxy primer and then we use conventional automotive paints PPG as our supplier of choice what is a approximate leave time on a kit from ordering today six months six months six months so you're making your own tail rotors here yeah so we've been for the last nine months or so we've been building our own tail rotors and those are comprised of an O 31 skin as well as an aluminum tube and a titanium rod and various rivets and so this metallic simple design tail rotor skin is is very effective it's pretty low cost and we get great longevity out of it and so here you can see an example of the landfill that we made what we're looking at here is a quick build if a kit builder wants to buy a quick build kit for our machines it's a little premium this is they'll get a skin mounted bunch of parts that keep them off of their own fabrication and just keep them in an assembly mode if we're not building the machine here or providing a factory assist we're going to crate up the fuselage and get it down the road with the rest of its components so that the kit builder can build it wherever they may be building the kit we just talked about a California burg where kids can be made this one happens to be going to Australia we have a Malaysia kit there we have a South America kit so we ship all over the world routinely a little bit over half of our production goes overseas and here you can see one tail one crate stacked on top of another okay and we can fit between these two crates we can fit everything that you need for your helicopter in them Wow so we are in the final assembly building now and this is an example of a Finnish built machine this is a customer build machine [Music] we have any number of different models here but this is where the payment fuselage is the machined assemblies the engine assembly is all meet and they get integrated and put together such a machine could be testable so typically this machine the experience is considered wearing a helicopter not necessarily flying one and so 85 horsepower strapped to your back with 19 and a half foot rotor blade makes for a great experience and it's a lot of power on a little machine at 100% out of the PTO which this says a vertical PTO we run a centrifugal clutch that expands and starts to grab at about 40% it's fully grad it's fully grabbing at about 70% 100 percent is 6,000 rpm so it's automatic does not anything that the pilot it's not anything pilot has to do once you get to 3000 rpm it starts to open up but what it is it's not very glamorous term but it's an oversized go-kart clutch okay and this goes to our what we call our primary reduction so our first reduction assembly through a belt drive we go then to a sprag clutch assembly and that Spragg clutches is oriented in such a way that if the engine ever ceases the rest of the rotating equipment will continue spinning and in this reduction we go from a 6,000 rpm at the PTO to our tail rotor rpm of roughly 2600 rpm and that then is coupled to a driveshaft that brings us to a splitter box and that splitter box then in a 101 ratio sends at maximum 8 or 10 horsepower back to the tailbone and also sends the remaining power straight up to the final reduction now earlier in the process we were talking about this component this is a mass production mount and this is a very rigid component as you can imagine we're trying to keep this assembly nice and taut so that the belts stay aligned properly and one of the reasons this machine is successful is the ability for us to use cognate belts as we do the belts are very lightweight and we have no transmissions what's the service life of a belt five years or 500 hours on our upper reduction we actually have two belts there's a redundancy of top any one belt is good enough for this application but we run - just in case conventionally the machine sees at maximum at maximum torque of between 55 and 80 foot foot-pounds constant and so if you know anything about these belts they're minimally used so this is a redundancy and we're really it's over built like crazy having over speeding this head is not really consideration it's often that in an auto rotation you can put an extra you can spin it up 20% beyond your hundred percent and have some cash in the bank so when you make it to the ground and you flare you have a lot of energy in your blades and that's not even a consideration you do a quick post flight make sure everything's fine but this head is built for three times the energy that will ever put in it and so compared to some conventional helicopters where if you if you come over 10% of what the maximum rotor speed would be that the head has to be disassembled or inspected we've got a lot more capacity and safety factor built into this this is what the operator is flying you're seeing this in a configuration such that you might not be familiar with it it's on its ear but this is our final pulley and just underneath it through our control structure is our swash plate our machine is a conventional helicopter and where we have the cyclic and a collective and typical foot pedal controls are cable control taking off we want to give the way our rotor spins we want to give a little left pedal when you're picking up at first but I want to show you the mixer assembly on how these two instruments are coordinated for the head if you move as I move my cycling around you can see I'm moving it roughly in a round direction and you can see that it's inputting into the tubes just the cyclic it's moving my input tubes up to the swash plate and if you look up at the swash plate which is up here you can see roughly that's the same thing that I'm doing with the cycling moving it around so now it's mirroring that izmir is mirroring now the same rate I can also pull pull collective and and prop collective and so all of that there's five degrees of freedom here that are combined in three mixed to state go up the fact that this is some people say oh this isn't a real helicopter there's nothing about this helicopter that isn't real its conventional cyclic and collective we build in here any number of components and we use some outside machine shops for our machining needs so the composite FX has four different models and XE which is our base model these days it goes for 37,000 out the door before creating and shipping May 12 2013 yeah a little more expensive than that is the XEL it's $1,000 more at 38,000 it's also a kid out the door and that is the ultra light machine and that is roughly a stripped down XE and exited without options but it has floats so that we can come under the criteria of port 103 with our float allowance following that is the XE 285 which is our bigger piston engine it's water-cooled fuel-injected and oil injected mate instead of the 55 horsepower for the smaller machine it makes 85 horsepower and that and has been lately the real workhorse a sought-after model and then finally the XE T which is a turbine machine solar engine and makes about ninety five shaft horsepower it's quite the Cadillac that when we're done with it it makes all the right sounds of the turbine wine and and whatnot it consumes a bunch of fuel but it's quite the heart and so we have four models that we offer the build time varies on what kind of a builder you have and without judging some builders just want to get up in the air and they're not very detailed driven others are much more interested in creating a masterpiece that also flies 400 hours of assembly time putting the machine together and a top end we've seen some some machines of 2000 2100 hours once they're all put together if you go to composite - FX comm you will find our website and all of our information for our website it leads you to the factory here in Florida where this interview was was taken as well as it mainly due to various dealers around the world whether they be South America Europe Australia and hopefully you can find a dealer near you or you can call the factory for any questions that you might have so what do you think guys pretty cool helicopter thanks for taking the time to watch today and if you're new to this channel invite you right now to go ahead and subscribe hit the like button and also a little bail notification for future videos help me encourage more people into getting into building aircraft and remember just build it [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Experimental Aircraft Channel

Views: 1,860,694

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Id: oQ4ENu7QKoY

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 06 2019