LMAO Vic, I didn't notice that until now!

OK this is a bit long but tell me your opinions

Head speed:

I’ve been wanting to put this out there to you guys for a bit but haven’t taken the time to type it up till now. Out of the box my B400 flew just fine. I could hover, do FF and basically say that unless I was interested in 3D flying I never would have adjusted anything on it. Being we all love to set our heli’s up the best we can, you know I started into it. The first thing I noticed out of the box was that at half throttle stick it was VERY light on the skids and lifted off at about 55% throttle. Once I put a pitch gauge on it I discovered why. At ½ throttle stick I had 3 degrees positive pitch!

Now everything we read tells us that a proper setup heli will have 0 degrees pitch at ½ throttle stick position. In order for me to achieve that, I needed to raise the swashplate quite a bit to get it in the ballpark. I then lengthened the blade grip push rods to get it exact. So now it takes about 70 to 72% throttle to get the heli to lift off the ground (because of less blade pitch at ½ throttle stick). Thus it has more head speed before getting airborne. So now when I switch to idle up mode there is very little noticeable change in head speed. (I have idle up throttle curve set to 100-92.5-85-92.5-100) So I see about a 10-12% increase in head speed when I hit the idle up switch.

From what I know, the throttle curve is independent of the actual stick position since you can program it any way you would like. Conventional wisdom tells us that a proper throttle curve in normal mode is 0-25-50-75-100 and pitch should range from negative 3 to about 10 degrees. In idle up, pitch should be negative 10 to positive 10 but throttle should be 100-2.5-85-92.5-100 to have more head speed for doing more aggressive maneuvers.

So what am I getting at? Well if flying in normal mode and at 75% stick position I get liftoff (because of the pitch of the blades not because of the head speed) should I then reprogram the throttle curve to have less head speed? In other words, is all that head speed needed just for hovering & some FF? Now I understand that for really aggressive 3D, the higher the head speed the better (not really sure why but I accept that to be true). So in normal flight mode, should the throttle curve really be linear?

Hope this makes sense.

Jim