Cyclic pitch is mostly going to come down to how far you can set your Aileron and Elevator limits with out the inner swash rubbing on the main shaft or the flybar cage hitting the blade grips. You would check it just like you do with collective: set the blades at 0 pitch and put on your pitch gauge, then (with the blades in line with the boom) push full right aileron and measure the pitch while holding the stick to full right. For myself, I think I'm flying with about 7.5-8 degrees of cyclic and +/- 11 of collective on a 450SE.

Mechanical setup is mostly irrelevant here as there are other key things you need to be doing with mechanical setup (e.g. getting all the arms parallel and perpendicular). If setup right (see "Finless" Bob White's videos) the amount of Cyclic pitch you can achieve will be dependent on your helicopter's design and not on linkage lengths.

As far as binding goes, it's okay to bind in the corners. It's not okay to bind full left, right, up, or down. If you're not using a cyclic ring, you have to envision that circular path and make sure nothing with in that circle is binding (because it would be tough luck for a washout arm to lock up during a piro-flip ).

Dual rate and exponential settings are going to be based on your personal preference (just as anything else should be), so choose what feels good to you.

And I could be wrong, but I don't think mechanical mixing would be any different than CCPM. Either way you're looking for the same things when setting up linkage lengths, and your pitch is going to be a factor after that is all setup and you're adjusting travel for aileron and elevator.

Sorry if I mis-understood any of the questions, and please feel free to let me know if I botched anything up. Again, check out Bob White's videos at as your best reference especially "CCPM 1" and "CCPM 2".

Good luck!
- Chaz