So after the last few months of issues with mental and physical health that have mainly been borne from my inability to be outside (where I spent my childhood years, formative young adult years, and even many work years etc etc), I have started to try and make progress towards recovering the only way I know how. Mainly, that’s to get my backside, somehow, back outside, more often. Any way possible.
So to start with, I have a DJI Inspire 1 that was broken. While we still have a small drone to film near people, this thing is an absolute beast and is a far better fit for me when I’m flying. Especially given that the CAA to date has changed their VLOS (Visual Line of Sight) guidance, that suggests how far a drone can be away from you and whether or not you can see its orientation or not. It’s silly really, and has been implemented terribly (which may mean it will change again one day soon), but for now it makes seeing our tiny grey drone in the sky a real problem.
The Inspire is much bigger than our smaller drone, and so has its own issues to contend with. It’s too heavy to fly close to people, which means that I will have to fly it under Article 16 Authorisation via the BMFA, and that will allow me to fly closer to people than I might otherwise be able to (although that still means 30m away). Thankfully though, because it’s bigger, and because it has a very specific shape, I will be able to see it a lot further away. Plus the app used with this drone ‘DJI Go’, rather than the ‘DJI Fly’ app that the Mini drones use, will allow us to livestream to YouTube or Facebook. That opens up possibilities for our media creation.
Both the Mini SE and the Inspire 1 have their benefits and compromises. There are mid sized drones I could buy and fly with my A2CofC (A2 Class Certificate of Competency), but if I can get things done with the Inspire 1 (A3), via Article 16, it’ll be fantastic. We’ll see.
But for now…. it was grounded (by me), because it had a mechanical issue. I bought it broken originally, so there are already videos of me flying it for the first time and writing about it on this blog after it had been fixed. It looked like someone had stepped on it quite hard and broken one of the arms, so I sourced the correct part and then slowly deconstructed it, figured it all out and rebuilt it. It flew amazingly the first time.
Then, on another flight out with it, the battery was getting low, so I brought it back in to land, lowered her down and waited for the landing gear to automatically descend. But it didn’t. It absolutely refused, which meant I could either try and strategicallly drop it down to the floor, which could risk the drones arms, its underslung camera, props, and motor being broken, or my daughter could catch this 3kg flying monster as I slowly landed. Luckily, that’s what she did, and very bravely too.
I had initially suspected that the sensors on the bottom of the aircraft were defective; that perhaps it was not reading the distance to the ground and thus not putting the landing gear down, however as it turned out, it was all working as it should, and I could even hear the servo spinning for the landing gear screw mechanism. It still wasn’t winding the screw however.
It became obvious after that, that it was a gear or even the motor in the servo that was at fault. When I stripped it though I ran into loads of issues trying to get to the servo. Firstly all of the major bolts are made of chocolate it seems, and they melted as soon as I threatened them with an Allen Key. I struggled for ages with stud removers, but I eventually resorted to drilling out the one super stubborn bolt in question and I managed to remove the servo.
I then had to split the servo case, which was horrific. The screws are thin, but very long, and like the rest of the drone, they are all screwed into alloy, which wanted to keep a hold of them. Every single one of them snapped. It was a proper hassle, but I was into the servo now.
I inspected all of the cogs and gears in the gearbox, and they were all fine. I was stumped for a second, until I remembered that in situations like this, the weakest link is going to be the most obvious one, and I tried to spin the pinion gear on the motor shaft, which then came off in my hand. So the sound I heard was the motor spinning properly, but it was not attached to the small cog anymore, and so not turning the gearbox and subsequently the fine screw that operated the landing gear.
Simple fix. Glue it back on, which is certainly what they did originally, however all the bolts had snapped for the case, so even if I did put it back together, I would have to glue the case together too. Then I would have to find one of these silly chocolate bolts for the main frame so that I could re-attach the servo (which I could not find anywhere), and I would have to get the one out of the main frame that was still snapped off inside there (which would mean some precise drilling and maybe even tapping and helicoils later on).
I decided not to do any of that. It seemed too flimsy and unstable for a 3kg flying vehicle. So I would buy an entire center frame for the drone. Unfortunately, because the parts are not readily available anymore, I had to wait until someone broke an Inspire for parts, and put one up for sale. That happened this month, and I snapped it up.
From then on, the repair was pretty simple, except for the fact that the new part is quite literally the center frame for the entire drone and it’s connected to almost everything else on the aircraft. This meant a complete tear down to just the legs, and then a ground up rebuild of the Inspire. There’s now not a single part on this craft I am not familiar with.
That being said, once the old frame was finally removed, the new one went in lovely, and I now have a load of spare parts (although Cerys was eyeing some of them up for a ‘Ray Gun’ build we are going to make at some point). I put her back together, popped a battery in that I had previously readied, and ran full mock flight tests on her, except on the table with no props on. The landing gear and everything else worked perfectly.
So the next step is to fly her, perhaps with a friend who also has one, and with Cerys flying the DJI Mini around us for some unique footage.
My mood was significantly improved. I am sat down almost all the time now, but I tend to be restricted to one room (where my TV and PC are). I venture to the bathroom every now and then, extremely slowly, but being able to get to the kitchen, sit at the table and rebuild this was superb fun. I felt like a bit of me had returned.
There are more images in the gallery below.
There are more plans to get me and my children outside over the next year as we’re all struggling, so I anticipate more adventures, more geocaching, more sailing, more walks and flights, and almost certainly more videography and photography (and pointless blogs writing about it all). We are going to try and populate most of our websites and YouTube channels too, which are immensely helpful in showing our abilities, but also the trips out we’ve had, the things we’ve seen, and the memories we’ve made.
It’s a path to feeling better. The Inspire was the start.
Onwards, and hopefully upwards.
Peace,
Emma.
