acceptable amount of slop

Good servos are pretty cheap these days and some cheap servos are pretty good (I just picked up a shirtload of Futaba S3151 digitals for $19.99 each) so if your old ones are getting a bit worn or won't center properly you might be better to sell them on eBay and buy something a little better.

I get the feeling that most profiles are built so light that *any* flutter would rip the tail-feathers off pretty damned quick -- although good throttle control should keep you down to a safe speed and greatly reduce the risks.

Bad centering might be more of a problem -- although probably not the problem it is for those circle-jerks -- since my sticks hardly ever rest at neutral once the bird has left the ground

but is the play kinda normal? When my plane's at idle it sounds like a damn snare drum and you can see the surfaces vibrating and its irritating as hell.

To answer your question about acceptable slop.......

NONE, ZERO, NADA, NYET
Tight is the key word. Pull pull systems should be tight, pushrod system should be tight. Everything should be tight and slop free.

I've had the same question hounding me for months. My brand new JR Z590M servos had what I would consider alot of slop, right out of the box. It wasn't so much of torsional slop, meaning around the axis of the output shaft. It was more like the output shaft itself was flexing. If the shaft is supposed to be 90 degrees to the case, it would flex to approx. 88 (just a guess). This translates into approx. 3/16" slop at the end of my ailerons. Everything else in the linkage setup is tight. Even though I was worried about flutter at first, I've put approx. 50 flights on the bird with no flutter. I've even made some full-throttle straight and level passes (16x6 @9400 rpm, about 53mph on paper) and have noticed no flutter whatsoever. The centering power on the JR's is awesome, too.

spastic said:

balance your prop
if you can grab the surface with the radio on and can move the end of the surface more than 1/4 inch then you have too much slop, no servo or linkage has zero, although it is the ideal use good quality longer servo arms and long control horns and use good quiality clevises or even better ball links, you may have worn out the bushing on the servo though and that can be a bumber the best are 2BB servos

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My pushrods and clevises have no slop whatsoever, its from the servos, i balance my prop, etc :roll: oh and are 475's any good?

now that i think about it, could my extremly aggressive flying style have something to do with it?

surfnaked said:

My pushrods and clevises have no slop whatsoever, its from the servos, i balance my prop, etc :roll: oh and are 475's any good?

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I'm using some HS5475 digitals on the ailerons of my Katana P ($35 each) and apart from the fact that they're a little slow on 4.8V (mind you, *all* servos see slow compared to the 5925s I've got on the tail feathers), they seem like a nice little servo (they're the digital version of the 475).

Digitals will give you better centering and greater holding power than regular servos so I like them for 3D.

how many flights could i get out of a 1200mah hydrimax 6v with all digi's?
sorry for all the dumb questions im not very part smart.

I get three or four with a 720 mAh pack... I'm guessing you'll get a few more with the beefier pack.... I always check my battery berfore EVERY flight....

I limit myself to 4 flights from the 1050mAH pack I'm using. It then takes about 30 minutes to recharge on my field-charger at the 1.5C rate so I'm guessing I might have another flight or two left in it if I tried -- but I'm not going to

Just 2 fingers.

Captain Winky said:

Just 2 fingers.

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dont get picky...