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May Day! May Day! Chopper Down!

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Racer 1966

Racer 1966

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  1. Bashing
So we're walking around Wally World letting my son decide what he wants to buy with some Christmas money. He finally decides he wants a Havoc Heli. He tells his mom he wants it because dad wanted one at the lhs. It just so happens we're going to hobby shop again anyway for some paint for our other new hobby and while I'm picking the paint he show's mom the heli I was looking at the day before. Next thing you know she's buying it and says Merry Christmas!

Here's what I got:

myheli.JPG


I wasn't expecting that,I hadn't even seen the heli outside of the pics on the box. I was surprised by it's size when I opened it up at the house. It even came with a 2.4ghz 5chl radio with DSM2 technology. Here's a comparrison with the Havoc.

helisizes.JPG


I read the manual,charged the battery and started fiddling around with it. Crap! there's going to be an exspensive learning curve here! I already broke the tip off of one rotor and I was only trying to get it to hover. It didn't work out so well yet :hehe: I think I may need some help on this one :yes:
 
RC Addict said:
The hover is the hardest part. Or is that the landing???

You are a lucky SOB!
Click to expand...

I've always wanted a heli,just haven't wanted it bad enough to spend my money on it :) So this was an awesome surprise,but probably not the best choice for my first heli :hehe: I'm going to pick up some rotors and training gear after work tomorrow then give it another try.
 
very cool wife:D I have the MCX and broke it allot when I first got it but now can fly it pretty good. I am looking to step up to the CX3 just for something bigger and faster. let us know when you get it dialed.... I see that it comes w/ a 2c 800 mah lipo where the mcx has a 1c 110 mah lipo and I get about 10 min or so of flying/crashing. very interested to see if it is too big for in the house.
 
nice present..i have the same story as you... I always liked the look of helis but never bought one.. This christmas, my dad gives my an mCX which is a little bit smaller than yours... I love mine but yes, the hover is the hardest part.. I'm getting really good with it so far!! Have fun like I am dude!!
 
Whats the radio like for these?
 
Hey, cool, I bought one of these the week before Christmas.

A few tips. Flying it indoors is TRICKY! One very good reason, "wash".

The swash plate is designed to pop open rather than break, so if the heli suddenly wants to fly off at high speed after take off, you'll need to push the sway plate back together as the servo linkages are way out of whack.

Trying to hover at a few inches, within ground effect (the first height it seems to "settle" at when it lifts off) will be unstable as the down wash from the rotors creates pressure on which the heli floats. Real heli's use this for taxi-ing and call it "hover taxi" because pilots often have creative and original minds :) The downside for such a small lightweight heli the wash also creates eddies and vortexes which pull, push, bounce and sway the chopper about.

Try hovering up at 2 feet, it's easier but the throttle gets harder and it's a harder drop if you need to kill the throttle in a panic cause your about to hit something, which brings me to the next point about wash.

There are 2 further effects of the wash on objects other than the ground. Reflections and wall magnet'ing. Objects around the house, like cupboards, chairs, doors, walls, sofa's reflect and otherwise get involved in the wash off the heli causing more eddies and vortexs to buffet and jerk the heli around. The other, more annoying effect is "magnet'ing", I'm not sure of the technical term for it, but basically as the heli gets close to something like a cupboard door in the kitchen, it creates a low pressure area between it and the surface immediately causing the heli to make a B line for the obstacle.

Be careful with spot landing on counters as well. Once you pass the edge, you will proably re-enter ground effect again and the heli become unstable. More unstable than the floor as the ground effect has a edge to screw it up and make it even more turblulent. To see just how turbulent, put something that will make smoke on it, or fire a CO2 fire extinguisher at it while it's hovering. It will create huge spiraling vortexs of smoke/co2 around it.

All of this means that hovering this little blighters indoors is a complicated affair with lots of jerky sharp control inputs, cutting of the throttle to save the blades.

I chipped all my blades hovering indoors and popped the swash plate twice in the first day, until, while trying to spot land on a counter in the kitchen lost orientation, paniced and dropped the heli face first into the counter and 4 foot onto the floor, snapping one blade in half and splitting another all teh way down the blade. 2 sets of new blades : £12.

Outdoors... outdoors it's a completely different little puppy. It's almost boring if you have plenty of space and no wind. It will hover around at 6 foot with the hands off the sticks if correctly trimmed. It will move around a few feet and the tail twitch occasionally but it's relatively tame! You'll find you will use 100% throws on the right hand sticks and wonder why it's not going very fast. Thing is, indoors it was getting close to it's top speed anyway, it just looked too fast!

DONT FLY IN WIND! It has a top speed in any direction of about 3mph. Fly it in 4mph wind and you will be chasing it.

Great for practicing orientation and spot hovering, but nothing on a proper heli.

Real Flight - G4.5 was my next purchase, thinking about a Blade CP or Blade 400, but they are not auto stabilising like the CX3.

Hope this helps.

Paul
 
I want a heli....I have worked on the real ones for years...flown in a lot. But have a big question when it comes to my skills. I am pretty confident in will be a crash and burn, fix and repeat until I am out of cash.
 
RC Addict said:
Gave me a lot to think about. Been wanting a heli for a long time and that is definitely noob need-to-know info!
Click to expand...

Go on, go for it :)

The Blade CX3 or CX2 are ideal first 'hobby grade' heli's. If you don't go for one of them, just make sure it's a "coaxial" heli. Meaning 2 counter rotating blades. The counter rotation means there is no torque rotation which plagues all other heli's. Also, the bottom blade is 'attached' to your servo's so you control it, the top blade is attached via a control linkage to the fly bar (the little bar with weights on it). The flybar always wants to spin level and will always pull the top blades into a fairly stable hover, so... when you let go of the controls it will return to a fairly normal hover.

For indoors only flying, I'd go for the little Blade mCX or one of the mini heli's the CX2/CX3 are, as discussed above a little too powerful for indoors, at least until you master it and know how to trim it perfectly.

Try to get a 4 channel heli over a 3 channel as it takes all 4 channels to learn proper hovering.

The Real Flight sim is invaluable for learning heli's (and planes/gliders/soaring). I think I must have put at least 30 grand into the dirt on that sim. Most of which would have been genuine real world "Doh! How did that happen?" moments. It's not cheap, I got mine off ebay for £100, normal retail is £150. Comes with a Futaba 8 channel controller which has no radio, but a USB cable instead :) You can plug a normal controlling into it though or buy an adapter for $40 so you can use any 4-8 channel Tx via the trainer cable.

My next challenge is to see if it will take off with one of these clipped onto the skids....

http://www.dogcamsport.co.uk/md80s-peanut-sports-camera.htm

Paul
 
That's AWESOME Randy! I bought a CX2 a couple years ago and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I got bored rather quickly and wanted something with a little more power and slightly advanced capabilities. That's a great learning piece though, no doubt. Have fun!
 
frickenjoey said:
I want a heli....I have worked on the real ones for years...flown in a lot. But have a big question when it comes to my skills. I am pretty confident in will be a crash and burn, fix and repeat until I am out of cash.
Click to expand...

Just to calm your woes a little. I have done horibble things to my CX3 and it has just popped back up into the air as if nothing has ever happened. I wish my buggy would have been the same, slide it sideways into a curb at 3mph and BANG broken rear hub carrier. Granted it was about 30*F/-1*C and so the pastic brittle, but I dropped the CX3 into the tarmac outdoors at 0*C and it didn't break.

Difference is the car weighs something like 4Kg were as the heli complete with battery weighs like 200g!

As long as before it hits something you have the throttle at the bottom and as long as it doesn't have much height, it will usually be a mater of set it on it's feet and take off again. The most common injures are the blade tips chipping.... don't fix, just fly. Too many chips, especially non-symetrical and it will make it much harder to fly, but it will fly. I'm currently flying it with a split blade and it makes more noise, but doesn't otherwise care!

The other "OMG! It's BROKEN!" style injury is the swash plate popping open. Disconnect the battery.... No do... REALLY!! and shove a percision screw driver under it and push it up, turn 90* repeat. It will pop back up onto the servo horn ring easy. There is a disasembly manual google will find you for the CX2 (95% same heli), but the swash plate can be done ignorantly. If it can survive the blades smashing into the ground at 10,000rpm it can handle some prying with a number 0 philips. To remove the body shell, BTW, you need to remove the blades, flybar assembly and the main shaft rotor shaft and thats a lot of work!

I've flowen directly into walls and cutting the throttle has allowed it to beat itself into the wall at full RPM and drop to the floor in such a sad state, but immediately fly perfectly again.

NONE of this applies to the next step up, collective pitch and single rotor w/ tail rotor heli's. Without training 'wheels' or even with you are looking at, at LEAST, a set of new blades every single tipover/crash and probably new head set, swash plate, servo linkages, fly bar, tail boom and possible rotor/gears/drive belt, the main rotor plastic gears that strip, etc. if it's bigger crash = £10-£100 on a cheap heli, £50-£250 on a Trex 600. Per crash that's expensive.

You can "beat" a coaxial, but not a proper heli.
 
Last edited:

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