Thanks for the support guys - I really appreciate it. And thanks again for giving me the idea in the first place!

I really feel that we are on the right track for tuning the CX up to its full potential. A couple of weeks ago I was convinced that stiffening the blades was the answer, but now it looks like damping is the way to go. By limiting the flybar travel, effectively what we're doing is making the upper and lower rotors behave in a more "parallel" fashion. The blades on 1:1 coaxial helicopters are much "floppier" than those on the CX, relatively speaking, and they don't have blade clash. So, on a CX, it simply must be the upper rotor damping that will make the difference. Based on soloboss's experience, we know that a locked flybar makes the heli unflyable. So, all we have to do now is dial in the sweet spot and see where it takes us.

I have some different density foams that I plan to experiment with tomorrow. Packaging materials for electronics seem to be a good source for this sort of thing. I bought an Airtronics receiver last month for one of my cars, and it came packaged with some extremely dense stuff that's not unlike foam rubber, only less "bouncy". It should provide considerably stiffer damping... hopefully not too much. The concept of a free-floating centerpoint with hard limits (maybe adjustable with a set screw) is also an interesting one. It should provide for a nice mellow hover and hyper response on cyclic inputs. I might have to play around with that as well to compare. Anyway, I'll post my results here as the experiment progresses.

I really like this little bird. I thought my Blade CX was just going to be a temporary trainer. Who knew it would be so fun to tinker with? I'll be keeping this one around for a very long time.