Hi Guys,

I am going to get a Blade CP soon and was wondering if you guys could give me some good beginners tips on how to make the Blade a little more stable/ better.

Also any sites that offer tips would be great.

Thanks.

Dustin, just read the first 70 pages of the thread "E-Flight Blade CP". It's all been covered there.

As BalsaBasher mentioned, reading the thread is a good starting point. However, if you don't like reading mindless drivel and personal conversation, mixed in with the real questions and answers, you can go to www.bladecprepair.com to get tons of info on that helicopter. If I were you, I'd learn to hover on it, as is, stock set-up. Then once you can do that, get the lipo battery, 9 tooth pinion motor, heat sinks, bell-hiller mixer, and superskids. After all that, you will have a pretty decent machine to beat on, while you learn side-in hover, nose-in hover, and forward flight. oh yes, and symmetrical main blades. get those once you learn to hover on teh stock blades. If you keep breaking lots of stock blades while learning to hover, get the plasti-blades, but beware, if you have a hard boom strike, you will be buying a $12 main frame set, and some $5 blade grips. I have a very very precise scale for measuring paint for PPG intermix system. It measures down to .01 grams, which I have used to remove some excess material from the plasti-blades. I put them on a diet and got them to 8.46 grams each. then I balanced them, and now, I have no more problems with tearing up the helicopter, when I do have a hard boom strike.

I really should take some pictures of exactly where I removed material from. The shape of the blades is almost identical tot he shape of the balsa wood stock blades. This is not nessesary, since the material is stronger. There is a bit of over engineering in their design. I removed lots of weight just by trimming them down, without making them any less stable than they were. Also, I have crash tested them, once on purpose out of shear frustration, and they haven't broken. the edges do nick, but with a small flat file, I reshape them to reduce turbulence at the leading edge, and trailing edge.

One thing that kills performance on a helicopter is air turbulence. With any helicopter, and I have yet to see this mentioned here...

You can't bring the helicopter straight down, fast, to land. You have to either move in steps, or come in at an approach angle, by using fore cyclic, and push the helicopter down to the ground. once it is within a few feet of the ground, you pull aft cyclic, to bring the nose up, and it will stop it's decent, and you can do a landing within ground effect. By dropping the heli down too fast, the rotor blades have to operate inside of their own turbulence, and this makes them less efficient. Less efficiency means that the helicopter will decend faster and faster, and the effect will worsen. You can try to overpower the effect by giving it a high head speed, but it won't completely recover, unless you move it out of it's own turbulence. This is a critical point to learn when flying helicopters. That information was given to me by a physics professor at CMU(Carnegie Mellon University- THE school to go to for mechanical engineering and robotics.)

John68 raises a good point, if you get up above 6 feet or so, try to either desend extremely slow, or move in any direction while decending, or you will lose control. The condition he describes is known as vortex ring state (VRS). I can explain it in higher detail, but I think I'd be better of just saying try and keep your hovers at about 3 to 4 feet when you start, that keeps you close enough to the ground to put it down at any time. Truth is when I learned to hover mine for the first time, I learned to hover at about 1 and a half feet off the ground, which is ground effect, and will make it more dificult to hover, but keeps you from breaking parts.

Say, where can I get my hands on some these plasti-blades you mentioned here?

I got my plasti-blades from HeliDirect.com, along with the Super Skids. There is a weight penalty, and I'm down to about 5 mins flight time with the stock motor and battery, but its not costing me $17 / per flight when I trash the wooden blades on one of my "landings". Where I would have gone through over 10 sets of wooden blades by now, the plasti-blades barely have a nick in them. I am bending the main shaft more, but its easily straightened, and its also alot cheaper to replace than the blades.

Ohh, the best 10 dollars you can spend is on training gear, I figure you would probably realise this, but without them you'll roll your copter every 4 seconds when you first start. I would stick with wooden blades, performance is better, and if you're carefull you won't spend that much on blades anyways. I started in october, and have gone from complete newbie, to a point where I can now do most stadard flight, I'm still shaky nose in, but forward flight is a cinche, and in that time I've only gone through 3 sets of blades. My motto was, stay low, and if you get within 3 feet of something, put it down, simple. Following those rules, with training gear, it's really hard to break much of anything, and flight after flight, you'll get better. That's my advice anyways.

This may be a bit nit-picky, but you are just outside of ground effect:

So 1-1/2 feet off the ground is just a bit out of ground effect - not much, that's why I said this was kind nit-picky...

Gary

According to that yes, but I'm talking about actually flying the helicopter, when I fly as low as I did learning to hover, the helicopter gets unstable, therefore, ground effect. Ground effect is also heavlily influenced by what your flying over, which that quote doesn't mention, grass for instance has a tendancy to dissapate ground effect, so you can fly lower with less problems, a smooth surface however tends to make it worse. I'm a science nut, but sometimes the explanations from science aren't entirely correct. That also just says you get higher performance but seems to skip over the fact that it's also harder to fly mainly because that is an explanation more suited to full size helicopters. Not to mention that when you get close to certain surfaces it will induce VRS, and therefore decrease performance and stability. I'm just trying to say that ground effect isn't a set distance from the ground, and while I agree that what you quote is a good guideline, it will not always be correct. Also consider that several people learn to fly these little electric helicopters in parking lots, which due to the surface will have a higher ground effect that grass or dirt. In short, I would define ground effect as any distance above the ground that the helicopter has altered flight charactoristics induced by flying in close proximity to the ground.