Creating nightfly blades for 450 sized helis

Welcome to my article on building improved nightfly blades (improved over the ones from my first article "Getting a helicopter ready for nightflight").

First have a look at the video above and at these pictures - because this is what the result looks like. - You can see my Blade 450 X equipped with the blades flying at around 70% throttle (it's a v-shaped curve.)

This picture shows the takeoff, it is taken with a nikon d3100 with three seconds of exposure time:

Next we have a loop (or something that wants to be a loop anyway):

And another high exposure time picture taken in flight:

Okay, so now you know what the result can look like.

The improvements compared to the nightblades in the first article are:

- led placement is much better, you now get a nearly fully illuminated rotordisc

- the leds are bigger and therefore much much easier to solder and handle

- one blade is responsible for illuminating the upper side of the disc, one for the lower side, but they also have one led on the other side (as a safety feature)

What are the ingredients?

- leds

LED 1206-105 BL (blue)
LED 1206-420 RT (red)
LED 1206-480 GE (yellow)

They are all smd-leds, "1206" means they are about 3.2mm by 1.6mm (or 0.13in by 0.063in).

- resistors 

SMD 1/4W 120 (120 Ohm for red and yellow)
SMD 1/4W 47 (47 Ohm for blue)

These are smd too and about the same size as the leds. They are used to limit the led current intake of each led, so they won't burn through:

- 1s lipos

I use two 160mah turnigy (hobbyking) 1s lipos, you can also use e-flite lipos

- copper adhesive band

I got mine from ebay, it's about 8mm wide (i cut it in half to get two 4mm wide bands). It's used to create the circuit for the leds on the blades.

- heat shrink

One that just fits over the blades with the lipo attached, to secure it in place

- 5 minute epoxy

To secure the leds onto the blade

Okay, here are the steps to build the blades:

First try it all out not on a blade but on some surface where nobody will complain about burnmarks or other damage:

I put some solder onto the copper first, then hold the led or the resistor in place with tweezers and reheat the solder. When you are comfortable with this and your leds work then you can move on to solder onto the blades.

First attach the copper tape to the blade, so that on one blade it runs along the upper side of the blade and on the other blade start on the upper side too (because both lipos will be installed on the upper side) but on this blade tape it around so most of the tape is on the lower side of the blade.

It is a good idea to test the blade after every led that you install, so you can redo the led if it does not work:

Here you can see both blades (notice one has most of the leds on the upper side, one on the lower side):

After installing all leds you can now secure them with epoxy, then glue on the lipos near the start of the blade (make sure they do not block the hole and the area where the bladegrip is attached) and secure them with the heat shrink.

Now the blades need to be balanced:

Use tape on the lighter blade to get them into balance:

Install these blades onto your nightfly helicopter:

Then Then just go fly and have a lot of fun in the night!

Disclaimer: This is what I have done, and I had no problems in flight. But I can not guarantee that the blades you create can withstand all flight maneuver. So always keep your distance!

Thanks to Florian for taking long-exposure pictures with his nikon.

Thanks to flitetest for your cool videos and this site!

Thanks to you for reading my article, I hope you enjoyed it - please leave a comment!

If you like you can also read about this and some other model related things in my blog (beware, it's in german): http://janpeter.net