Essentially, these arms are going to make the plane fly better. These arms are going to make the entire control system much more rigid with much better control centering. I'm still the paranoid type and will use a locking nut and some medium CA on the back side, just to be dead solid sure. I think the arm would stay on without it, but I'm still going to use one!Īlso useful is the arm is tapped for a 2mm bolt where the ball link is attached on, so you could probably get away with a little locktite and just crank the bolt down. It's on there, and now I worry less about the bolt that actually retains the arm falling out and the arm popping off. These arms fit the spline pretty well to begin with, but once you tighten the cinch bolt there is less than zero slop. Other arms I have had to pry off with a screwdriver, but with the Extreme Flight arm you remove the center mounting bolt, loosen the cinch bolt, and after some gentle wiggling it pops right off. The Extreme Flight arm seems to be just right in that it goes on easily with a little gentle pushing, secure the center mounting bolt, then sock it down tight as a clam using the allen cinch bolt on the side. Metal arms I have tried previously were very difficult to get onto the servo because the splines were so tight, and getting them off was a problem too. You don't have to drill anything or measure anything. The holes in the arms are 2mm, so you just bolt the ball link on and forget about it. They are pretty light, and I am guessing they might even be lighter than the plastic arms we were using before. Now Extreme Flight is making their own Xcessories Beautiful anodized light weight aluminum arms. Basically we were stuck with plastic arms unless we wanted to special order expensive custom arms from a specialty manufactures and pay postage on top of it. I tried a few aftermarket metal arms too, but no one made an arm that uses the 2mm hardware that comes with the Extreme Flight 48-60" span kits. This makes trimming the plane for precision maneuvers virtually impossible, and you'll spend the entire flight either fighting a plane that won't stay trimmed, or chasing the trims the whole time. The servo will center fine on it's own, but with slop in the pushrod system the surface may or may not. Now, we have slop in the linkage system again, which affects centering of the control surface. The plastic splines would spread out under load and then the servo arm could wobble around on the servo output shaft. We were getting a lot of slop in the plastic arms we were previously using. This was a big step forward, but then we needed to look at the servo arms too.
#REALFLIGHT 7.5 PRECISION AEROBATICS PLANES. FREE#
Years ago we went to ball link connectors on both ends of the pushrod to assure drag free and slop free connection and smooth operation. We are running at least four times as much (and sometimes more) throw than you would run on a sport plane, so if you have something like a draggy ball link or sloppy servo arms, problems with getting the control surface to center are going to be about four times as bad as you would normally expect. When you use a long arm, anything wrong in the linkage system is greatly amplified. Part of this naturally led us to a critical look at the servos and linkage system. The harder we started pushing these planes, the more we had to look at improving areas of performance. Xcessories Rockin' New Extended Servo Arms As a 48-60" span specialist, I don't really fly larger or gas powered planes, but Xcessories has part for those planes too like the excellent Blazing Star engine mounts and Flo Master fuel tank There are a lot more quality Xcessories that I am going to cover here. That last part alone can save you a lot of money. You only have to order from one plane, it all comes in one box, and you only have to pay one shipping price. One huge advantage to the Xcessories lineup is that you can now order absolutely everything you need for your new plane when you order it. It gets back to the weakest link in the chain, and with Xcessories, the last weak link has been eliminated. For one thing it looks cheesy and out of place, but more importantly, poor quality accessories can sometimes fail and cause you bigger problems, like a nasty crash. There is not a lot of sense in building a top quality plane and then using junky accessories to finish it off. Every Xcessory is top quality, which makes sense because we will be using them on the most top quality planes. Right at about a year ago, Extreme flight began releasing some of their own brand of hardware and accessories under the Xcessories name. At the time is was one or two accessories, but now it's grown to where we need to roll it out there and show you all of the Xcessories that make life easier and the build of any project go more smoothly.