RE: Two bolts on main shaft.... special steel or not?
Hey Robert
Glenn has given you some excellent advice in the posts above and I dont' think now that you are doing anything wrong - you are just plain "learning". The event you speak of where you have just bent your feathering shaft again... my guess is that the blades weren't set out straight when you spun up. The imbalance will just throw everything out. I did it twice the other week and bent two flybar rods in the space of 5 minutes...
Check that your blades are reasonabley tight in the grips. I heard the correct tension suggested like this recently:
If your blades are at 3 & 9 o-clock and you tip the heli on it's nose they shouldn't move. if you give the heli a little bump on the nose they should move down. But importantly - when you spin up make sure the are aligned with the blade grips and 180 degrees apart. If everything was set up right - it's the only thing it could have been.
These checks become routine but its easy to miss something. The other day I took off with the Gyro switch in rate rate mode (down) and also the rudder switch in dual rate mode. It was spinning like a good'n and I only just managed to land unscathed. Unfortunately we tend to learn by mistakes!
Hope that helped.
Jon