Hacking the Hobbyking Talon Tricopter

eirikso, ,

This is one of the nicest multirotors I’ve built so far. Lifts my GoPro with ease. Flies very stable and powerful enough for acro. And I love the fact that you can fold it in seconds and fit it in a suitcase for travelling.

But to make it perfect you need to hack it slightly.

Turnigy Talon Tri LOS and FPV from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

This is my spec:

Turnigy Talon Tricopter
T-Motors MT2016-11 900 KV
Tail Servo: TGY 306G
HK F30A ESC with SimonK firmware
FreeFlight 1.3 FC running Baseflight Multiwii
Battery: TGY 4S 2200 mAh

Props: Have been experimenting with different ones. Best experience with 10″ Graupner, GWS 9x5x3 and carbon 8×4.5 Slowflyers.

The frame in general is very nice, but the tail servo mechanism is not good enough. Fortunately you can fix that by adding two thrust bearings and a longer 3 mm screw.

The problem is that the original tail mechanism is nearly impossible to get really tight and still smooth to move. If you add two thrust bearings this problem is fixed. I used these.

Then you need a 3 mm screw that is longer than the original. Approx 30 mm plus head. The original is 25 mm plus head. I used a 40 mm screw that I cut down to 30 mm.

Now you simply assemble like shown in the images. Screw with thrust bearing, mount, original bearing around the screw, thrust bearing, another of the original bearings, motor mount and then a 3 mm locking nut. Tighten till you have it completely without slop but still smooth to move.

In addition to this I’ve mounted the motor plates the opposite way of what’s indicated in the manual. In a serious crash it broke one arm exactly where it’s weakest: where it has a slit to fit the folding mechanism. I hadn’t had the time to buy extra arms, so I fixed it by fitting a 12mm carbon tube covered with epoxy inside the arm that broke.

So, pack it and get out there and fly!

Hacking the Hobbyking Talon Tricopter

13 thoughts on “Hacking the Hobbyking Talon Tricopter”

  6. Christophe, from France says:

    Thank you so much ! Just done this fix on my talon tricopter. Works Great, I think this is the only issue of this great tricopter frame.

    Reply
  7. Stu says:

    Sorry, I still can’t see how you tighten the lock nut up and and that fixes the locking up problem. You are still tightening the whole assembly up so it hasn’t fixed the problem. I’m building mine right now and have a great collection of nut, bolts and washers. The head of the bolt is a perfect fit to ride on the center of the bearing so I left that as is. Then the next section I fitted the washers with the groove facing outwards, then the roller bearings then the other grooved washer. One of those grooved washers are slightly different in size to match the slightly different sized recesses in each part. Why I don’t know but Both sets are the same. I then added the motor mount, the small washer they supplied in the bearings kit and then the lock nut.

    I tightened it up until it began to get tight then backed of slightly and everything was as slop free as it’s ever going to get with a bolt for the shaft. A nice stainless steel bolts with just a small amount of thread on one end would be much better

    Even though it’s a lock nut on the end It’s definitely something to keep a watch on after every trip. In fact the whole assembly should be watched very closely on each battery change. I also packed the whole lot with food safe grease. (non acidic) It’s still a right mess of a design. And I’ve seen better pivot arms on toys helicopters. Nice photos by the way. Regards Stu

    Reply

  10. I just put together the Talon tricopter. The one I received had the double ball bearing setup in the tail. My problem is getting the KK2.0 setup correctly to work the tail rotor. I just swapped over some of the things I had on the BatBone, I did the -100 on Channel 4 and that did help my BatBone, but it was never that stable. I am going to do a factory reset, recalibrate everything and reload the motor layout. I am using the Turnigy 306G Ultrafast High Torque Digital metal gear servo. What is happening is that is seem to hold steady when I power up, it does not seem to move with the rudder (I did check my signal wire is hooked up on Motor 4, I am drawing power +/- hooked up to the receiver, I did have that issue before on the batbone) – The servo is getting power and after flying around, it starts to tip whatever way it wants, then will often just totally throw to one side or the other and hold. Any ideas?

    Reply

  11. I have several KK2-cards but haven’t tried any of them on my Tri. They’re used in quads, hexas and one running OpenAero in a plane.

    On the Tri I have only used MultiWii. Try the KK2-thread on RCgroups. Lots of experienced helpful people there.

    Reply

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