Pintail Winter rebuild 2016-2017

After the crash at the worlds, I decided to give the craft a full rebuild, also with a view to selling it on as I committed to buying a Eurocraft hull. The entire machine was stripped down to the bare hull, and any little crack was fully repaired.

Brand new cross bag was fitted onto a floor with extra Kevlar patches all around. All the frames were rebuilt with new bearings and new fan blades.

Lift pulleys were re-furbished/ new bearings/ re-machined into v-pulleys rather than u-pulleys. Also a new cogged v-belt was trialled in 6^th gear. Compared to 5^th gear, this spins the lift fan 10% faster, which at the same fan pitch, should absorb about 30% more power.

One funny realisation on re-building, was a kinked coolant hose- after I sorted this the temperatures were solid between 70-75degC. In 2016 I went to the effort of adding oil coolers and gradually increasing their size to keep temps down…

Overall the pre race weight was 204kg which is pretty respectable since it was 195kg new in 2014. A lot of this was thanks to removing the clutch during 2016 which was -4kg.