When you take your lama v4 out of the box, you may found that the shaft, swashplate and gears are too low for making the upper blades spin. And the lower blades may turn in a wrong direction. Here is a tutorial for fixing all these problems by leveling the swashplate. After that, your helicopter will be able to perform hand-free hovering and necessary for beginners to increase the stability. If you are going to move the pushrod to another hole on servo arm, swashplate leveling is essential too.

Before Swashplate Leveling

Please make sure that the lower main rotor hub is installed on the outer shaft correctly. The upper screw has to be lined up with the holes in outer shaft. Otherwise, the swashplate may be unable to level.

Make sure servo arm and servo pushrod are placed perpendicularly. This is important to attain a balanced and smooth motion for lama v4. If unfortunately it’ s not at 90 degree, then you better fix it. First, turn on the transmitter, together with the trim controls centered. After you see the red light on transmitter and green light on 4-in-1 control unit, power up the rc helicopter. Just remain the cyclic control at center, then unscrew the servo arm off the servo. Then relocate the servo arm until it is perpendicular to pushrod. Now, Fix the arm onto servo shaft and screw it back. Last, switch off the heli and then turn the transmitter off.

Lama V4 Swashplate Leveling

The key of swashplate leveling is to setup swashplate parallel with blades’ rotation plane. It is all done by hovering and the tuning afterwards. As the swashplate is not level at the beginning, ready to use cyclic control to hover in a larger space. When the heli is hovering, use trim controls to counteract forward or sideways movement of helicopter when cyclic stick is at center. After trimming complete, keep the trim controls where they are on transmitter. This is essential information for you to adjust the pushrods. Power off the helicopter and transmitter. If the trims are centered and helicopter was hovered without horizontal movements, congratulation, your swashplate is already leveled. But if the trims are not centered, then keep reading and adjust the pushrods.

Pushrods Adjustments

After removing the tail and canopy, look at pushrods from the back of your lama v4. From the picture below, you can see that left one controls forward/rearward movement(elevator) and the right one controls left/right movement (aileron).

Forward/rearward (elevator) pushrod adjustment

If the elevator trim is set in a forward position, then you have to lengthen the pushrod. This result the cyclic pitch forward, imply that the trim will move back to the center. Adjust the pushrod in 1/2 turn increments and re-attach to swashplate. Pushrod should be lengthened by disconnect and unscrew it from swashplate ball joint. Reconnect pushrod to swashplate ball joint after adjustment.

If elevator trim is set in a rearward position, then elevator pushrod have to be shortened. All the steps are similar to above, but make it opposite.

Left/right (aileron) pushrod adjustment

If the aileron trim is set on left, then the aileron pushrod have to be lengthened. Just like what procedure above for lengthen elevator trim.

It is more or less the same for shortening the aileron pushrod, when the aileron trim is set toward right.

Now you can fly your lama v4 with much better performance!

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