You may want to look at the new Esky HoneyBee King. It looks like an upgraded Blade with a shaft drive tail. It's designed to go brushless and use a better gyro. Most of the simplicity of the Blade but with those pesky tail motors taken out of the equation.

Will wait to see if it catches on or if Horizon comes out with something similar.

Also the HeliMax MX400 from Tower looks like a nice TREX clone that is due real soon and the price is not too bad either.

Regards,
Lee

where are some personal vids of this thing flying havent seen nothing but promotinal vids thanks

Ok what does it mean when the 4 n 1 blinks red and then goes solid red. Battery is charged, tx is on and throttle is all the way down.

Got it to go to green but if I run it up to lift off the whole thing shuts down. Have to unplug the battery then reconnect it to get back to green light. I could have had a raptor 30 by now with what I have spent on this thing. Don't get me wrong I do really like it but it seems that every time I get going, I have to replace something again.

Solid red means the unit will not allow itself to arm the motors. Blinking red means the gyro is calbirating so DON'T BUDGE THE HELI while this happens! The solid red you're getting means that one or more of these conditions aren't met for the unit to let itself arm:

1) Throttle stick is all the way down
2) Throttle TRIM is all the way down
3) Idle Up switch is OFF (Pointing away from you)
4) Throttle channel reversing is set to NORMAL (OFF)

Once all these conditions are met the unit will blink green several times then show solid green. But changing any of the above conditions while the unit is blinking green will reset the arming proces and you must meet these conditions again for the unit to start arming. Once it is armed be CAREFUL about that Idle Up switch or your motor will go to full power from 0 which can tear up the gears, startle you and possibly damage your rotor blades if the heli tips when this happens.

For the record: Alternating Red and Green indicates that the receiver is NOT picking up a signal! Check your crystals and receiver connections, your TX and heli battery pack voltage, check your RX antenna length and that your TX antenna is fully extended.

If your heli is brand new and none of these steps change anything, BRING IT BACK AND GET A REPLACEMENT! If you have been flying your heli for a while and none of these steps solves the problem and you had a crash recently, you could have damaged your RX crystal and/or your 4-in-1 unit itself. Crystals cost $10 I believe and a 4-in-1 runs you a hefty ~$70. If your 4-in-1 is indeed shot, and you have already got a good aftermarket CCPM-compatible computer radio that you use on other helis, this would be as good a time as any to convert your radio system to utilize an aftermarket radio. All you'll need is an Eflite 2-in-1 Control Unit (~$35) and a basic Pieze Gyro (a GWS PG-02 gyro costs ~$38, but you can also use a CSM heading lock gyro or any micro gyro, maybe even a 401 if you can find a good spot for it). So getting those two units will run you about the same cost as a 4-in-1 (if you already have an available micro receiver like a JR 610UL) but you will get much more consistent performance and pitch and throttle curves that you can change, not to mention every other setting!

Once I get my heli fixed (again...!) if anybody needs advice on converting their stock radio system to an aftermarket system I'm happy to help. I'll hopefully have my replacement parts this Friday and have the heli rebuilt by Saturday, and be flying by Saturday afternoon!

Thank you DarkWombat
I will go through it and check everything again. The first thing I was going to do today was to get new batteries for the TX. They are down a little bit so I thought I would check and see if that does anything. I will check crystal connections and all that you suggested. I appreciate your explanation, knowledge and description of possible problems. I went to the LHS and was told to call Horizon cause they didn't know so I will do that also on monday.

Thank you again for taking the time to explain.

im having a problem with my blade, out of the box it was nice but im still learning to fly this machine and i have a few rough landings and i have had to replace the blades now when i power it up i get a lot of vibration and it does not want to take off at full power, any suggestions to fix these problems???

Greetings:

Since I have been having glitching problems with my Blade CP, I decided to take the 4-in-1 apart to look for problems, but did not find any. My swash plate and rotor head move freely on the shaft, so the problem does not seem to be mechanical stickiness.

While it was apart, though, I went ahead and photographed everything and identified most of the major components - hey, I'm an engineer, what would you expect ;-). Care was taken to not zap the components with an ESD event.

Here is the webpage with a description and lots of photos.

http://www.rfcafe.com/references/art...P%204-in-1.htm

My other Blade CP page with more photos and a couple flight videos is here.

http://home.earthlink.net/~modelairp...s/blade_cp.htm

- Kirt Blattenberger

Greetings:

Here are a couple personal videos of my Blade CP. I'm still in the learning mode, with a little over 50 flights logged.


http://home.earthlink.net/~modelairp...s/blade_cp.htm


- Kirt Blattenberger

Kyle1,

When mine vibrates most of the time I find one of the flybar blades is not lined up with the other (or they are not flat when the should be). Center the stick and make sure the flybar blades are flat and pointing the right way. Also make sure you have not bent the main shaft (fairly easy to spot during low rotation). Good luck.

Steve

Kirtb, I was in the same situation as you were, but I was at the time already determined to change out to an aftermarket TX. The engineer in me also got me to take apart the 4-in-1, and while it would have been possible to use the ESC/Gyro part of the 4-in-1 and just slap on an aftermarket receiver, it was just so much of a hassle (that and I burned the unit out in the end anyways) that I just got a 2-in-1 unit and used my own TX.

Anywys, read a couple posts of mine up and you'll see what I said about glitching issues. The antenna position on the stock setup I found was crucial, as reception was annoyingly line-of-site: if I didn't point the antenna right at the Blade (but a little to the side because around the top of TX antennas there is a dead spot) I would get glitching. It got to the point where it was really impacting my flying experience, so I went PCM with my JR 6102 and I haven't looked back since (actually I stepped down a notch and got a micro FM receiver because the PCM receiver was too bulky to fit, but it still works a million times better than the stock setup!).

But for starters, see if changing the antenna's position helps. What I did was coil half around the left skid and the other half would coil around the tail boom, almost all the way down so the winds of the antenna are far apart. See how that works and experiment. But if your radio is giving you problems that are as bad as what I had, then start considering the crazy route I took and just use an aftermarket radio and gyro.

What gyro did you use on your Blade CP separates? I tried using a CSM 200 with heading lock, and whenever I tried to turn the tail, it would pirouette to the right one turn. It seemed to work right during tests with just the tail motor plugged in. What rotor speeds are you running at?

I'm using a GWS PG-03 piezo gyro. It's a basic gyro and it's only $38 but it works quite well with the Blade I think. Good luck using heading lock with the Blade though, since it doesn't use a "traditional" pitch-control driven tail like a T-Rex or all the big helis, responsiveness I think is not as precise or quick as it would be with a pitch-control driven tail, which is why there's no reason to go over the top and get a heading lock gyro. Also before I did any subtrim and revo mixing my tail motor was always providing way too much thrust, making the heli spin right all the time. I had to dial in subtrim all the way to ~100 Left (125 is max) and tinker with the revo mixing to get it all worked out. But now it works fine.

As for your gyro, I can't help ya there except tell you what I did with my GWS gyro. To say the least, you're going to have to sit down with your radio and crank your subtrim one way or another and then adjust your revo mixing to get thngs just right. But it'll be worth it, trust me.

well i found out what was causing all the vibration, i took the head all apart and i bent the hell out of the spindle somehow, so new one on the way ill be back in the air and breaking different parts in a few days

That sounds like what my tail would do with the CSM gyro. What you said about adjusting the subtrim all the way to the left now makes perfect sense. I hadn't realized the difference between setting up a vaiable pitch tail rotor compared to how a motor driven tail works. I believe that a variable pitch tail has both positive and negative pitch, while the motor driven one adjusts from zero rpm to max rpm all in the same direction. I will reinstall all of my separates with this new found hope. If all goes well, then I will beable to program my Blade just like I have always wanted. How does your revo mixing do? Did you do any ACC mixing? Does your tail rotate any when you throttle up or down fast?

My current Revo mix settings are:
High throttle (>50% throttle) 70% Right
Low throttle (<50% throttle) 25% Left

I also made a mix that mimics the stock Blade setup that mixes throttle to rudder. Moving rudder stick to the right decreases main motor throttle by 15% proportionally to how far the stick has been moved from center to make the tail rotor work more effectively. Moving stick to the left increases main motor throttle by 15% while decreasing tail rotor throttle. This has made adjustments more effective in flight, I find.

Seems to me I must be doing something wrong, maybe someone here can set me straight.
Admitedly, I'm new to RC helis, though I've spent a lot of time in an EH-101 simulator flying it around so I thought I had some hope of controlling the BCP.
I got my Blade CP a week ago and have been spending the days so far scraping it along the floor of my garage with the training gear on trying to get a feel for manoeuvring it mostly through the pitch and roll.
Sounds like it should be a cynch to fly, at least to hover, but I can't help getting into a spiral of death of sorts. Yaw mixing is right on, since I don't have a yaw problem with changes in collective but I always find the beast starting off slipping to the right then somehow I get stuck (barely) flying it around in larger and larger circles while the nose stays pointed in one direction until I get going so far I have to cut the collective and sit it out.
Am I expecting too much stability from this machine? When I bought it the guy at the shop checked and tuned the proportional control then test hovered it within about the space a card table takes up.
I dumped it a couple of times on my lawn from about 1 foot up when I started but I can't detect any deformed or broken parts except for some of the paint flaked off the blade tips. The only oddity I've noticed is that the 4-in-1 is installed so far forward in the BCP that there's a gap between the aft end of it and the BCP frame (even though there's some 2-sided tape on there as if someone meant for it to be stuck on).
As I understand it the 4-in-1 only does yaw stabilisation, so should the BCP be fairly stable in a hover(for a helicopter) and it's just ground effects that are biting me in my practice sessions?

Just thought I'd share with you my new toy. I got this thing on Monday, got it to hover on Tuesday, flew all over the apartment on Wednesday morning. And yes I've never flown a heli before, I do admit that it's different than flying an airplane but it does help to have that basic knowledge of flight when going into heli's. I Brought it to work to show my buddies and they were amazed that I got it to hover for more than 30sec and only having it for only one day. I'm not bragging here, I'm just telling this because I'm amazed at how fast I picked this up. I did spend alot ( I mean a lot ) of time setting the heli up to get it to fly almost hands off for 2-3 secs in hover mode. I also did alot of reading on how to train myself on learning to fly a heli. I hope this inspires others that it can be done in less than a few weeks or months. I'm still a novice at it but I'm getting better and better, soon I hope to start flying nose-in. Usually I keep the tail at me and any time it gets going sideways from me I get disoriented. SO I'm still not mastered the 360 flight yet. Just tail in for now.

is it true that the blade CP and the honey bee cp2 are virtually THE SAME MACHINE?

cruzmissile

Congrats on you purchase of the BCP and you killer skilz. It took me a little longer to get the hang of it since I had no prior RC flight experience and no one in my area (that I know of) that could teach me. Everything I have learned came from these wonderful forums and trial and error. (lots of errors..LOL). But anyway I noticed in your pic that you have your ant. wrapped around the CF tail boom. Have you had any glitching problems? When I first bought my BCP I did the same thing and all of a sudden I started having the glitching problems in flight. It was more noticeable at about 5 ft. away and further. It got a little scary at times. Anyway, I started looking around the forums for similar problems and found out the the glitching was being caused from the ant. being wrapped around the boom. Some thing I did not realize was that the Carbon Fiber causes interference problems and therefore causing the glitching. I moved my ant. off of the boom and everything worked fine again. There was no more glitching. If you were having any problems or start having this problem then I hope this helps and saves you troubleshooting time. The less time fixing problems means more time in the air!!! Anyway, great job on the quick advancement and hope all goes well. These lil Heli’s ROCK!!!


Dan

Bladen 2

Good point... I have been hovering it really close to me so that I can maintain orientaion. I have not had it more than 10-15 ft away from me. I haven't experienced any glitching at close range but I'll wrap it back around the landing skids so I don't say, ( I wish I would have unwraped it from the boom.)

Really, right out of the box you get it in the air and survive?
I'm an aerospace engineer, have spent quite a bit of time in an EH101 flight training device and am familiar with the theorhetical side of helicopter flight but I still am fighting to keep the beast under control just half an inch above the ground.
I guess it really is just me.

The key I found out is you have to set it up relly good. When hovering if I notice it wants to tend to go right and i have to constantly hold left cyclic, then I set it down and adjust the linkages so that I have to use less and less left cyclic until it almost stays in one place. The rudder control is going to have to be set with the trim because as the battery dies down the nose of the heli will want to start wandering left. I always have to trim the rudder every 3-5 minutes. This is because the tail is driven by the motor and not by a tail drive system.

It is true that when you get about 2-3 ft off the ground the controls are more responsive.

Today I finally decided to take the training gears off and I like how it flies with them off. I have more response in the controls and better handling. I do state that the landings do have to be a bit more percise since there are nothing to prevent the tip overs.

I also have been and flown in many UH-60 Blackhawks and have always noticed the degree of tilt the tail rotor has and I decided to do some experimenting. I added about 5degrees of pitch to the tail. As you turn the tail rotor the gyroscopic effects make the heli do things your not ready for. The gyro is not that percise and so by doing this I conclude that it might help with the gyroscopic tendencies. It's an experiment and I don't know how well it will work. My batteries are charging right now.

I just switched from flat bottom blades to symmetrical. I now notice in a hover the whole helicopter leans to the right. Can anyone tell me why it is doing this? It also seems that I have to give it more throttle to get it off the ground, even with a Lipo. Whats up with this??

You'll have to change the blade pitch angles when using the symetrical blades. The flat bottoms don't need a lot of angle of attack since they have a high camber. The symetrical blades have camber on top and bottom, to maintain level flight (hover) you have to increase the angle of attack or increase the blade pitch.

And just how might I go about doing that?