I have an urgent question regarding a maintenence issue on a 500D I maintain. I have queried MD regarding this and what I get is "gee never heard of that before, good luck and let us know when you find the problem." I'm about fed up with what passes for customer service at MD and intend to chew my way up the chain of command first thing Monday AM.
In the meantime can anybody make sense or offer suggestions on this problem:
Just spent a large amount of money installing an overhauled rotorhead. Previous to this the rotor system was extremely smooth and beautifully in track.
Once the new head was installed we proceeded to once again balance the head (.16ips) and track and balance the rotor (.04 lateral, blades within .15" spread all the way from hover to 120kts, vertical .25 hover to .35 at 120kts)
Now the problem we have is, starting at ground idle the stick develops a pronounced shudder (feels like a 5p) if moved from it's trimmed position. Once retrimmed to the new position it quells the shudder. At 80-90%NR it goes away. In a hover and forward flight it reduces but is still there. There is also a 1p bump in the stick especially at hover and forward flight. These may or may not be related. At this point I'm extremly reluctant to try PC links or tabs to drop the vertical as I suspect it may be related to the shudder since before the head was installed the vertical was almost negligible at this same track.
The droop stop plungers feel a little stiff (in my experience normal for being new) but not excessively. Anyway this should not be an issue in hover and forward flight as the blades should be off the droop stops. BTW MD's guess for what's going on is the droop stops are too stiff. My guess is there is a stiff bearing or something in the head (perhaps a feathering bearing?) but I haven't been able to find it. Based on what we had before this thing should be smooth as glass.
Anybody ever run into this before? Any ideas on what it could be?
