jroo

Hi all.

Well, I got my mcpx in on thursday, but didn't get to fly. I wanted to get a case for my 250 and mcpx, so I headed to Cabelas which is about 5 miles from my house. I took my 5 yr old son, and we ended up staying for about an hour, just looking around. They had a pistol case for $29. It was plastic and had the pick-n-pluck foam, but I passed on getting it. We then went to Wal-Mart, and they had the exact same one for $10. I passed on that too. By the time we got home it was late, and I was just too tired to program my TX to fly the mcpx.

I ended up getting a larger aluminum sided case from Harbor Freight. It's 17" long and wide enough to fit both 250 and MCPX. Unfortunately, it does not have any foam. I don't know. I may actually take it back and get a different one from say Cabelas. I have an idea, after I buy the foam, it's going to come close to the price of a nice pistol case from Cabelas.

Now for the maiden of the MCPX. I went out of town from Thursday-Sunday, and I took it along. My first flight was in a smaller back yard early in the morning, so no real FFF was possible. There was no wind at all which was nice. This is a cool little heli. I have to keep reminding myself it is CP and not fixed-pitch. I suppose just seeing another tiny heli like my old MCX, 120SR, etc makes me subconsciously feel it should be stable.

After the first battery I immediately did the canopy grommet mod on the aileron and pitch servos. This makes a world of difference.

Not 30 seconds into the flight I attempted a back flip..haha. Mind you, I've never attempted this on my 250, 450. It just felt good to throw caution to the wind at let loose. Well, it 'almost' made it. I bet if I had another 3ft in starting altitude i would have stuck it. Either way, i crashed, and only damage was a crinkled canopy that I just popped out. It's surprisingly resilient. In 4 battery packs I crashed 5 times and never broke anything. I never lost a link either.

My last crash though resulted in some vibration at higher RPM's. At eye level I could see the tracking was off and i was hearing some distortion in the rotor noise. I took apart the head thinking that I bend the spindle, but that was not it. I then saw that the main gear had just backed down about 1mm and was causing some free play between it and the sleeve that screws into the shaft under the swash. I got all that taken care of and its back to flying again.

While the heli was all apart I did the super-glue mod to the forks that keep the main blade linkages from getting lost. Ran one battery pack in the office and everything seems fine.

Overall, a really cool heli. The flybarless thing is pretty impressive; it just magically stabilizes itself to a hover.