Some Arcticopter 1 repairs

We dropped the Arcticopter 1 a bit heavy on the grass and popped off the landing gear.  The threads on the nylon standoffs sheared off, incidentally losing the still-attached lock nuts in the grass. (update: kit now comes with aluminum risers!)

 Fortunately this is easy to repair if you've got the right parts on hand.  We've got a bag of 1/2 inch risers with 8-32 threads.  We bought them on Amazon.  They were out of the 2 inch risers, but we hoped that we could just screw 4 1/2 inch pieces together. Update:  the original kit used 4-40 threads, so we got a bag of those.  4-40 seems to work pretty well.

I was worried that several pieces screwed together would flex and be weaker than the 2 inch riser we were replacing.  Fortunately, they seem to be just as strong when screwed together tightly. Update: screwing the pieces together works well.  In addition, if you break a thread off, you can reuse it as the "nut" for the replacement piece.  Since these tend to disappear into the grass on crashes, it's a very nice arrangement.

I picked up some replacement lock screws from Ace, and swapped out the lovely stainless steel screws with plain old machine screws.  I did this mainly to replace the hex head with a phillips head, so the unit could be disassembled with a plain screwdriver.