Hello, I feel and understand your TREX 500 crashing Pain first hand .....I built a TREX 500 as my "learn to fly" heli --- this was many years ago.
I have an incredible large bag of parts that is huge from the many crashes.
I also had Spirit Pro from those early days on my TREX 500. I still fly Spirit Pro and love it, especially with 3.1 now available
My TREX 500 would fly perfectly some days and then other days, it became "possessed" with the true evil described here in this thread. At any given time without any apparent reason, the heli would "lock up" and crash for what seemed to be no reason at all. EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING.
Finally there was only one solution that truly fixed this problem for good, and unfortunately this high quality precision company no longer makes this part. The company that made these parts I2RC went out of business years ago, and they made a metal tail box that is all metal which grounded the metal tail boom to the very substantial metal tailbox as shown in this thread in pictures:
https://www.helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=679091This was the holy grail solution, and still is for me today.
I am still flying my now wonderful TREX 500 with that metal tail boom block and never ever have a static problem again.
I spent tons of $$$ on this heli wondering why it would out of the clear blue just lock up and crash.
So what will help you with this problem?
I highly recommend finding a "common ground wire" to as many metallic surfaces as possible to have a common ground across the metal components of the frame, motor, boom, etc anything metal is a must to resolve this issue. The good news is since adding that tail block many years ago from I2RC and/or doing the common ground wire to all metal parts I have had zero crashes (unfortunately, the I2RC metal tail block is no longer available, as the company went out of business).
I tried silicone sprays on the belts helped, but it has to be reapplied often, and running the ground wire mentioned to have a common ground across all metal parts as best as possible is the only solution.
Luckily with the I2RC tail block I purchased years ago, I have not had one static related crash since then. In fact I fly this heli a lot and maintain it, but the grounding is paramount to prevent out of the blue crashes due to static buildup issues that are pure evil.
Hope this helps, also if you have a plastic boom, consider changing it out to a metal boom, will help as well.
Trust me, I understand and lived this scenario, it was a night mare... hope you can use some of these tips to prevent static buildup crashes.
Dave