Glad to see I'm not alone in my weekly payment to the LHS for elfite replacement parts. I never did use the wood blades.. went straight to plastic. Every hard landing...ok crash. I either broke the tail boom, a blade grip or bent the main shaft.

I've read lots on this great forum about replacement parts as well as clever fixes, but rather than order upgrade parts I decided to try fixing what I had. To fix the main shaft problem I fabricated a new main shaft (luckily I'm a machinist) and resused the gear by removing the old bent peanut butter shaft ( i have lots of gears...). To fix the tail boom strike problem I formed a 12 inch piece of thin walled aluminum tubing into into a curved section. Halfway back to the tail the tube touchs the ground (thereby removing need for the flimsy tail support) then curves back up at an approx 30 degree angle. May look bad... but the blade flys (ok.. hovers) beautifully. Now when I land hard nothing breaks and I'm immediately back up in the air. flying ugly is better than broken pretty!



Ken