yay! i just got a call yesterday from the LHS and they got 2 blades in! So mine should be at my house soon, and another one's up for grabs if anyone wants it, it can be shipped right to you via UPS.


How long of a flight can you get out of the stock battery that comes with? and how fast can i charge it? im going to be wanting to fly all the time, so im gonna be charging/flying alot

Frosty,

I would suggest that you get some simulator time before you invest in a heli. The Blade is a great little heli for what you get but I'm afraid that new pilots will find it very frustrating to fly. Honestly I find that the blade is improving my skills because of the lack of a HH gyro. Don't get me wrong, it's very stable for it's size but you have to continually !QUOT!fly!QUOT! it. When I go back to my 30 nitro machine it's easy to fly. I know that several places have the blade in stock that you could order from.

helihobby.com
heliproz.com
ebay

The pitch adjustment are close to the same length (not sure how long they should be and if there's such a thing as them being too short), the head has been apart. I'll check that to make sure it's not loose. I did the washer swap out a while ago. It does shake when I spool up. Blades are new. I wish I could describe how much is see-saws. If I had to eyeball it I would say a good 15 or so degrees. But that's a rough rough guess. It's one of those things you wish you would have checked when it was new. I'm gonna head over to the hobby shop and check a new one.

But there seems to be a whole lot of vibration coming from somewhere. Should the head move back and forth, left to right without input? Because when I'm checking my tracking, that's what I'm seeing. It's almost like something is loose, but I know it's not. That's what led me to the O rings.

well if your sure nothings bent, its best to start at the top again and make sure everything is balanced. Double check to make sure the flybar is centered to the main shaft perfectly, the flybar paddles are perfectly aligned to each other and they are level with the paddle control frame. Also make sure there is no slop between the main shaft retaining collar and the top bearing. Also that collar has a taper on it should be facing the bearing not the swashplate. I never checked what it fealt like either out of the box Let me know how a new one feels.

Frosty the beer man. cool nick name.. If your interested into getting into RC heli. The blade CP is not a bad little rig to cut your teeth on. Its complicated enough to learn just about every aspect of a collective pitch helicopter. Though indeed it does fly out of the box. As a new heli pilot ( reguardless of any heli you buy ) You have to take an extraordinary amount of time at first to understand whats goin on. You will wreck it. period.. eventually. but this is a good thing. Make sure you have plenty of support close by, or are good with waiting for stuff in the mail. Though how much you wreck it is the part you concentrate on. Fixed pitch machines are good trainers because they remove a mechanical aspect of it for you to soften the learning curve, are basically for indoor flying and no wind outdoors whatsoever(its almost impossible to get them out of the sky once you start venturing it beyond an arms length). You will progress eventually if you get into it. I call mine "crack-o-copters" and a fixed pitch machine has its limitations. I like the fact that I can go to my hobby shop and pick 5 or 6 dollar items up here and there and stock up the flight box. Simulators are cool for keeping the rust off your sticks though actually having one adds not only a value to what you keep aloft, you learn the mechanical aspect of it also.. which comes with the hobby. The Blade RC heli will do anything a plane will do after some minor modifications and understanding. All that and you dont need a runway!. I have Just as much fun with it at a park chasing sky, as I do from my driveway chasing cars.

Mudsurfer1234 - The stock battery will last ~8 minues and will take 2-4hrs to charge with the wall wart that comes in the box. Do your sel a favor and buy a field charger like the Hobbico Quck field charger Mk II. I would also recommend purchasing the acro kit and installling the 9T motor + heat sinks and getting a Thunder Power 1320 battery. Run the flat blades until you learn to hover. One last recommendation, buy the training gear with the orange ping-pong balls - you'll save countless blade strikes learning to hover! This'll add ~$150 total, but it'll be worth it in the long run.
$50 - Hobbico charger
$55 - TP 1320 11.1 lipo
$25 - Acro kit
$12 - training gear set

Please all of you buying the li-pos, SEND ME YOUR STOCK PACKS. I bought the blade cp on saturday after reading about half of this thread on friday night. Along with 95% of the other blade owners I am a total newb. I got the rtr with a crash kit, both motor heat sinks, 2 extra batts and a main rotor shaft. I have swapped the blades and cut them down(damaged ends). I have replaced the shear pin 3 times. and straightened the main rotor conecting shaft twice. Now the ball link on the rotor head broke off. Is there a metal upgrade part that will work? Couse my machine shop is nit set-up yet and I can't make one. BUT HAY I am starting to get some control of this little greased squirl.

Well just an update about the conversion...everything's so far going OK, except the 2-in-1 burned out somehow. I was testing the main motor for a while and then the main motor got stock on full throttle, no throttle adjustments at TX did anything. Unplugging unit from receiver didn't help either, looks like something shorted in the main motor speed control, because the tail motor and the LEDs and BEC still work fine. The unit did get hot though, although it SHOULD be able to take a LiPo. I'm getting it exchanged at the hobby shop tomorrow and they'll send it back to Horizon, and this time I bought a $4 XPS speed control heatsink (speed control used in the RC18t 1/18th scale R/C car) and I'll stick that to the side. Since the receiver I'm using is long and I don't want or need to spend $50 on a a micro receiver, I bought some balsa wood and CA-ed it to the top of the receiver mount plate, extending it an inch or so. The receiver fits nicely with enough room to remove and plug in servo plugs without removing receiver. However, the receiver sticks out too far and bumps into the top of the canopy, so I cut an opening (cut is the wrong word, more like bashed, I'll get a new canopy soon and do a better job on that after I'm done prototyping), so the crystal and the front of the receiver protrude a few mm, no biggie. Also the opening should get enough airflow going over the heatsink of the 2-in-1 and keep it cool. I'm mounting the 2-in-1 on the other side of the receiver, which is separated by a vertical balsa slab and mounted against that. The gyro has a very nice spot attached to the back of the two rear servos, where it fits perfectly and works great (you need to position the gyro so that it is in line with the axis it will be rotating on, so I couldn't put it flat on something, it needed to be vertical). Rudder test showed that the gyro works very well, adjusting the tail rotor speed as I yawed the helicopter left and right.

So far so good, all that's left is to exchange my 2-in-1 tomorrow and mount it and I should be GOOD TO GO! Will take photos then.

If everything works out great, then I will write up a simple tutorial. It's really not that hard on concept, the hard part is just deciding where to mount everything because there's not a lot of space, and routing the wiring so that it doesn't hit the main gear or block any servo movement.

I got an Accu-Cycle Elite that i use to charge Li-ions in my big Yak, Li-Po's for the foamies, and the Nickel's for the .40 size planes.

I also got that field charger, and a li-po in the basement that i havent wired yet, i think it's only 900 mah, and i also have 2 1500 packs, both 3 and 2 cell.

Spinroll:
I went to the hobby shop yesterday to nab some junk for my truck, Had the guy open a Blade for me so i could check out the see-saw on a brand new one. Exactly the same.
The cool thing about these little heli's Vs the gas ones.. ya can hold it in your hand and scope out its performance. As I was doing so, I watched how the entire rotor head reacted as I manipulated the body. From what I can tell, that rubber o ring slop sort of acts as a buffer between the main blades and the main shaft, If you hold the main blades at their tips. wiggle it around some and I notice that the weight of the body is much smaller than just pushing up and down on the blades. I have concluded that its not the o ring slop thats making your blade tracking difficult.

The slop there is a buffer, yes. But also, the blade grips will push outward anyways when the rotors spin up, because of the centripital forces. When something rotates at high speed, forces push outwards from the center, so the blade grips would push away from each other. That negates any slop between the grips. With the rotors turning upwards of 3,000 rpm, I wouldn't worry about that. The slop there is also so the grips can rotate and adjust pitch without any problems.

Anyways, an update....THE HELI IS FINISHED! The original was christened Jasper by a friend of mine, so now this is Jasper II. The replacement 2-in-1 has not had any problems, due in part to the nice blue heatsink stuck onto its side. Because the heatsink hit the canopy, I cut a *neat*(-ish) square(-ish) hole that allows the heatsink to protrude a bit and also allows air to flow over it easily. After a good 10 minute flight of adjustments and such, the unit and heatsink were just warm to the touch, much better than the burning hot of the previous unit. I've been making more adjustments with the transmitter as well. Originally, the tail rotor was spinning way too fast and was over-countering the main rotor, spinning the heli to the right. After a lot of rudder subtrim and some Revolution Mixing (ratio between main rotor and tail rotor speed), the heli is performing better than ever. I adjusted the pitch and throttle curves from the simple stock Blade configuration so that in normal mode (haven't flown Idle Up yet), the throttle moves up quickly to about half throttle, where it slowly increases for much of the center of the stick up to about 80%, where it then covers the remaining 25% of throttle. In this spot of gradual throttle increase, the pitch changes in a linear fashion, so it will be easier (hopefuly) to hover. Basically, the end result is that while I hold the stick around the center to about 75% up on the stick, the head speed changes little while the pitch changes a lot so I can get the most stable hover. However, I'm thinking that I approached it the wrong way: the head speed should change in a linear fashion and the pitch should stay relatively constant, but we'll see. The TX also has two rocker switches that I've used a bit which adjust the throttle speed and the blade pitch in hover, so I can make adjustments to the throttle/pitch curve to get hovering down pat. Because I didn't want to deal with wind, I flew the heli in the garage for the time being and set it all up. I haven't tried the new throttle and pitch curves yet, during the test flight they were as close as possible to the curves that the stock Blade uses (check the manual where it shows those curves).

All in all, this has been quite a fun experience. I'm not experiencing ANY sign of interference AT ALL, no matter how far I am, how close I am, how much the antenna is extended/collapsed, NOTHING. Tomorrow morning I'll go to a park and fly without any worries of wind or interference so I can work the kinks out and get better at nose-in hovers. In a week or so I want to get flying in Idle Up mode down pat so I can do rolls and loops, and then eventually I'll try inverted flight. But first thing's first: gotta get everything set up right. I'll try the training gear first off tomorrow morning and then check it without them.

Expect a rundown of the heli soon after I get the TX set up as good as possible, so I can show the curves and all the settings used so that if anybody else wants to move up to a high-end radio system to get the most out of their heli, they can do it with few headaches. I'm sure a lot of you are thinking I'm crazy for going out and spending close to $300 on a new radio system, 2-in-1 and gyro, but I think that it is a worthy investment. It will be so much easier to transition from the Blade to a bigger heli, because I'll already get the the radio system worked out (and I'll already have a radio, so that's $200 I don't need to have) and I'll get a headstart on the feel of the heli. If any of you are really looking to getting a bigger heli, it would be a good idea I think to upgrade your current heli's radio system and mess with that before you plop down $700+ on a bigger heli right off the bat. Plus, you already have a head-start.

And for those of you who already have a bigger heli and have a Blade...what are you waiting for? All you need is a micro receiver, a 2-in-1 and a gyro and you can get better performance with the radio system you already know and trust! In the end I think it's really gonna save me in spare parts due to interference and radio glitching will be one less thing I'll have to really worry about when I try intense flight and basic aerobatics. You really don't want a glitch when you're inverted.

Well I think I've found the problem. Plain ole dirty. I took the head apart and cleaned everything. I cleaned bearings, bearing spacers, the spindle...everthing that needed lubed and could be lubed. Then I put it back together. Seems to work now.

I guess it just needed to be cleaned. Who would of thunk it....

Anyway it's much better now.

On to the next issue. My symmetrical bladed won't fit in the grips. They are so tight that even with the grip screws just in, the blades won't swing freely. Horizon told me to "lightly" sand the main blade hold down plates.

Yeah, the symmetrical blades are thicker than the semi-symmetrical ones, so it will be a tighter fit. Horizon is right, you'll have to sand down those plates, but that's a little strange. I didn't have that problem, they're a bit of a squeeze to get in, sure, but once I get to the screw holes and screw them in loosely they're fine.

About my heli: I was wrong with the original pitch and throttle curves, and now that I think of it I was stupid for putting them like that. Hovering is less pitch and more head speed, the more head speed the more stable it is. So to get a good hovering throttle/pitch curve set, you need an area around midstick where the throttle increases linearly or exponentially while the pitch stays relatively the same. After making this adjustment things are much better now.

Now the bad news. I was doing extensive testing to get the tail mixing right, and just to make sure my battery was ok I checked it on the charger voltmeter: 10.26 volts, still plenty of time to go. So I do more testing for another 8 minutes or so and the motor starts running down so I say ok, time to recharge the battery. I plug it into the charger and it reads.... 7.26 volts! I panic like crazy and immediately put the battery outside on the bricks for 15 minutes (I charge my battery packs indoors in a fireplace because there's an outlet close enough for the charger). After about 20 minutes the battery has cooled down and the voltmeter reads 8.99 volts. It's close to 9, should be ok...so I take it cautiously and set the battery to charge at .15 amps, 1/10C rate. An hour and a half later and the charger is showing the battery's just about done, and the voltage is listed as 11.6 volts! Looks like my battery's going bye-bye soon, it managed to overdischarge bigtime in that time span, every time before that when I'd get around 10.25 volts on the meter, I could run easily another 10 minutes and then bring it inside and charge, just hitting the 9.75 volt mark. But it seems that because I was constantly running the motor at a high speed, the battery drained faster than I expected, and since I wasn't actually flying it I didn't notice the drastic performance decrease. I'll try finishing the battery charge tomorrow and see how far it goes, fly it another time and check my voltages, but it looks like it's going to have to get dumped

Hi Guys, I am new here but have been reading everything I could for the last few days. I am and RC plane pilot for almost 30 years and have always wanted to try my hand at helicopters. I have been playing with the G2 sim for awhile and I bought my BCP last Friday. Just call me crash. This is harder than I expected. I have replaced the skids and the rotors already. I have a question. I have already made the modifications for the sticking rotors and found that the washers were reversed. I also found that the washers were completely missing on one side. Not nice. The question I have is that when I get ready to lift off the BCP starts to skid to the left so I have to apply right thrust to straighten it out. It this to be expected or do I need to trim something up. What should I expect from a correctly trimmed BCP? How much control should I be expected to apply to get the BCP to hover? Any help would be appreaciated.

Jaless........same here.....(now, i have the training gear on also). But when it starts to hover/lift, the unit heads directly left.......(So I will wait ffor a response). My radio has everything mid-trim (accept for throttle all-the-way-down).........

Im no expert on hellis but I have taught myself to hover with this little helli and mine allwasy drifts to the left untill I break ground and get into a two foot hover then it leavels out as long as im on flat ground but if I fly on a hill or curved ground even at that higth the little helli still drifts a little at a two feet hover from the roto wash.

Chris

kaamacat, if it's drifting left give it right trim to compensate.

You'll notice that yes, on sloped surfaes, performance can be unpredictable at low altitudes because of the uneven forces bouncing off the ground from the rotor blades and then back up (ground effect), on a flat surface is comes back up more flat but on a curved or uneven surface some areas may get more ground effect than others, so the heli goes in one particular direction. After you get about 5 to 6 feet off the ground though, ground effect doesn't happen...it's all about the wind now =)

Oh, my LiPo pack seems to be in decent enough condition. I finished charging it this morning at about 1/10C rate (150 ma) to make sure the battery isn't screwed up from a fast charge. They say that if you fast charge a LiPo after over-discharging it you do more damage to it than the over-discharge did. The LiPo peaked out at 11.6 volts, 1 volt lower than it should be (12.6). I ran it a bit and then charged it up at 800 ma, and now it's peaked out at 12.45 volts, getting closer. Hopefully in a couple more charges it'll be as close to 12.6 as I can get. I'll use it a few more times and probably retire it, as I need to step down to a 900mah pack because the 1320 mah pack is a little heavy for all the aftermarket radio equipment I put in.

Come to think of it, I've always wanted to see a LiPo battery catch fire, I've seen the vids but still.... hehehe.

Hey DarkWombat, what is this "2-in-1" thing you keep referring to? I believe I understand what the roles are for most of the other components. This new controller you bought; is it one of the computerized controllers?


I'm quite pleased with myself as of this afternoon. I was able to successfully land my Blade on top of my dad's SUV. I've finally gotten the hang of flying without the training gear and can keep it in a pretty stable hover.

Jaless, As a fixed wing pilot, your familiar with the sticks of course. Though you have to re-invent the wheel when it comes to hovering. In forward flight heli's are more comparable to an airplane and trimming is essential to getting any craft to respond to exactly how you wish it to, heli's its number one especially in hover.. Trial and error and patience are key factors. The better you trim out the hover, the better chance you have at recovery. With an airplane trimmed out nice, you can get in a level attitude and let it fly straight, scratch an itch, have a friend give you a drink off the water bottle. smile for a photo. etc. With a heli. Same goes. Though its not forward flight your reaching for.. its predictablity. It needs your attention 24/7(metaphorically speaking of course). DONT BLINK, it has a mind of its own. There are more aspects of trimming a heli than an airplane, As you progress into forward flight with it, it will become more natural but master that hover first.. If it drifts left.. trim right on the cyclic, If it spins right.. trim it out left on the rudder. If the tail wags.. back off the gyro, if you grow nads and wanna see what happens when you push the throttle more than normal, watch what happens, if it favors left.. turn up the proportional(proportional makes the tail blow harder relative with the rotor head if ya turn it up) and visa versa. A whole new set of aerodynamics are involved, The single most important thing you need to concentrate as an airplane pilot, getting into heli’s is hover.. period.. after that it’ll all make sence.. but it’ll take as much time to hover.. as it did for you to land a plane nose in.. (reflect)

its a hover thats gonna save your investment if ya get lost in the trick..

I had some experience with installing the wooden symmetrical blades in the stock Blade, they were tight also. I only sanded off as flat as possible the tops of the main blade hold down plate as to make sure that there was at least the bottom plane in the grip to hold it true.

Ah yes, the 2-in-1. It's a unit that's just the speed controls for the main and tail motors and it's a mixer for the two speed controls. It does not include a receiver or a gyro, which is what the 4-in-1 which is included with the stock Blade CP has. The 2-in-1 is designed to be used with an aftermarket radio system and gyro, so you plug the gyro into it and plug it into the radio system and you're good to go. You can see what it looks like here. It's smaller and much thinner than the 4-in-1, of course, but in the end you get more weight because of the gyro and the receiver, although it's not that much. The radio is a computerized 6-channel radio, the JR XP6102. Very good price I believe, and it has a ton of features that you'd only find on radios that cost upwards of $500. And you can see what that looks like here.

And congratulations on your successful hovering! Stay patient and careful and keep working at it and soon you'll be doing forward flight easily. Helis get so much more fun once you realize that you CAN learn how to fly them.

In the great majority of cases the heli will not hang vertical in the air, there is a slight tilt. As u lift off the left
skid lifts off first, thus causing the slide to the left. Put small pieces of fuel tubing on each skit at the front and
rear (helps saving the sanding of the bottom of the skids by the concrete serfice) to stop the sliding allowing
the left skit to rise while the right skid is kept from sliding left by the fuel tubing. This also stops the ground
piro when spooling up and spooling down the rotors. (Photos avail upon request).

Guys,

Thanks for all your help with this. It is a whole new ballgame. I was getting a little frustrated that I couldn't just get up and go and that it was taking so much time and the little guy was getting so banged up. I will try to get this straight in my mind. I know I have to stop watching the tail and start looking at the nose of the BCP. If I start reacting to the tail then I get it all backwards.

This is a good group, glad I found you.

Joe

thanks for that input............. I just got my new parts in and got practicing again. (tail rotor shaft w/gear and the two bearings). Think this time Im gonna put a dab of someting on the shaft end with another tube so it cant come off. It all came off in high grass and i just could not find the pieces.........accept for the rotor.