500 size CH-54 Tarhe (Skycrane) Build

Test fitting payloads and playing with mast tilt on the 500 size CH-54. The photos with the tail rotor attached have no mast tilt, and the one without has 1 deg fwd mast tilt. Right now I’m planning on 1.5 deg fwd tilt. Less than the scale tilt, but should produce a roughly correct hover attitude.
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One of the distinctive features of the crane is the huge tail rotor. A standard 500 size tail rotor (72mm blades) looked way too small. After some calculations and experimenting, I found that 104mm KBDD tail blades gave me the closest appearance. And the great thing about those blades is that they are extremely easy to re-shape since they are plastic. I decreased the chord of each blade by about 30% and re-shaped the leading and tail edges with a small belt sander, then re-balanced them. I’ve done this a few times to replicate scale tail blade shapes, and it has always worked great.

Also completed a test fit with the Vario 530mm blades