I am stoked right now, just hovered my Venture CP for the first time!!!!! I've had it for over three weeks now, and have just recently finally got everything fairly well set up. My only heli before this was an Axe CP, which I got decent with (had it about a year or so, until a low battery resulted in dumping it in a river....). I was insanely nervous.....for some reason I kept thinking it would be super hard to fly, even though I've heard the small electrics are harder. Well, and I was worried I had something setup wrong....apparently I got it pretty close, all I need was a click or two of yaw trim, and a 10% change in gyro gain to yield a rock-solid hover and NO tail wag! It even took a strong gust of wind in stride. Not sure I'll ever go back to small electrics, fun and convenient as they are.

All I can say on setup is that this heli reinforced my understanding that setup is CRITICAL, even more so than on planes (been flying planes for years). It sure paid off, what a solid heli. There was little setup on my old Axe aside from blade balancing and tracking, what with the hard-coded 3-in-1 unit and all. My hovers tonight were short though, the engine kept leaning out. After about the 3rd or 4th hover, I went to adjust the needle valve again and the whole carb nearly fell off in my hand...guess that would explain the leaning issue. I also seem to have a minor balance issue, thing shimmies like a washing machine at low-mid RPM ranges during spool-up/spool-down (worse during spool-down for some reason).

This was a used heli that appears to have had a boom strike, but no other signs of damage or even normal wear. The previous owner says a friend built it for him about 3 years ago, flew it for about 10 minutes, and then the owner decided he didn't have any business flying helis and parked it. It looked to me like it had never even been set up, the radio for sure had not been touched. The only concerning issue is that two of the JR servos have failed on me. The throttle servo was DOA (did not know at the time due to a dead RX battery), and the yaw servo failed a couple nights ago during preliminary run-ups before a hover attempt. No biggie, I have plenty of standard Futaba servos lying around, but it makes me worry about the cyclic servos a little. Might just go ahead and buy a pack of new ones for that.

Anyways, I am quite excited to be in the nitro heli game now. What a blast!

Matt