Oh man did I speak too soon...

Well DANG! I did a full pack of indoor hover, everything looked great.

A week later, I take it outside with a almost totally calm, clear day.

Did the hover routine - smooth takeoff, hover here, hover there, side-in right, side-in left, perfect landing.

REPEAT! Everthing looks great.

Ok, so I give a little nose down input and start to move - immediate difficulty!! Try to flare - can't... Very difficultly... Ok, got the hover again... land.

Well dang. Ok, up the headspeed and down the collective pitch curve. Smooth launch, perfect hover, smooth control of altitude. Fine.

Again, try forward flight - immediate difficulty!!! Dang... too hard... fighting.,.. can't get hover... swinging around wildly... I can contain it, but can't stabilize...

Darn, had to put it down. Did the best I could - I had the time to think about it. Tried to get her level at the moment of ground contact, got close. Very soft grass and very soft earth beneath absorbed a lot of energy, minimized damage, but still:

One rotor blade ruined. The other is intact.
Slight bend in tail boom - easily straightened (a piece of tubing around the boom reduced the damage)
One Blade Grip snapped (it did its job perfectly, saving further damage)
Bent Feathering Shaft - on order
Slight bend in Flybar - easily fixed.
Some teeth in the main gear chewed through. Its pretty bad by now, time to replace - on order.

Not bad as crashes go, but I have a control problem. I should have been able to flare and regain the hover. But, somehow I think when I give a pure right cyclic input, it is adding a pesky foward cyclic to the mix somehow. AND, when I give pure left cyclic input, it is mixing in a little back cyclic.

Totally annoying - the result is the heli does the Toilet Bowl maneuver every time I try to regain the hover or recover from a flare. Its impossible to compensate for on the sticks.

I decided that some of the problem could be mechanical, so I splurged on a few key CNC aluminum head parts... That brings my total cost up to TREX levels but I could be worse off crashing a TREX 3 times... anyway, its a hobby... no such thing as the cheapest anything,,,

I'm down a couple weeks while parts come in. I'll post pics of the new bling when intstalled...