tail is fine). I purchased the aluminum swash upgrade for CCPM and aluminum rotor head. With all servo horn's at a 90% angle and the swashplate at 17mm from the frame, should the mixing arms be centered and collective pitch be 0-degrees? I'm trying to figure out visually how the model should look at 0-degree main pitch. When I attempt to hover, the heli lifts around 3/4 throttle. Increasing head-speed has little affect - so I'm guessing I have the blade pitch set incorrectly.

I am also building a ECO8 I am using a 9CHP radio what radio are you useing

I'm using an Eclipse 7 radio - settings are good. I found more information on another site. From my understanding, mid-stick should set servo horns to 90 degrees with radio pitch curve set to 50% at mid. 50% mid stick equates to +5 degree collective. Mixing arms should align evenly.

THis is where I failed in the setup - i thought at mid-stick collective should be 0 degrees.

In a neutral 0 pitch setup (most idle up modes are like this) it's normal for the heli to lift off at just a bit over mid stick. If you've set your collective properly, you should have a very agressive collective response between mid and high stick where the bird will shoot like a rocket into the sky, assuming your motor is up to it.
This, of course, assumes that you are flying in an idle up mode.

If you're flying in normal mode where throttle and pitch are increased together, then you can set hover pitch at a lower stick since you don't have the option of negative pitch. In this case, hover (~+5') can be at mid stick or lower, low stick should be about -3 so the helicopter doesn't tip or spin during spool up.
Ideally, you should not fly like this anyways, because as your skills advance, you will need to readjust your flying and get used to midstick being 0 pitch instead of low stick as you progress to idle up flight.

Personally, for normal flight, I used two modes.
Mode one is for startup. Here, the pitch curve is -3 at low and reaches -1/0 at mid stick. In this mode, the motor spools up to to about 60%. I then hit the switch to idle up mode.
In idle up mode. I use -4 on the low, mid is 0, high is +9 or 10 (I think you gotta do collective mods to get more pitch out of the eco). Motor is also set to 60% at midstick in this mode to prevent the helicopter from jumping between the changes. With the 3 main points set, you can now go inbetween and soften up the pitch curve around hover, or set the curve up in a linear line, or however you like it. I use 100% throttle for both pitch extremes, at 3/4 stick the motor is at about 85%, same with 1/4 stick. Throttle curve obviously varies depending on your motor and flying style.

Basically, for linear response between positive and negative pitch, mid stick SHOULD be 0 degrees. Setting mid stick to +5 will give you a bit of a smoother hover response but then you will get a very agressive negative pitch response, aswell as having 0 pitch (decent) at lower than mid-stick, which will make things more confusing if you get into aerobatic flight.

That's about what I've heard so far. Now, as far as getting the machine setup, tonight I'm going to reset collective to zero at mid-stick. With that said:
collective should be at 0
bell-hiller should be horizontal
mixing arms should be horizontal
0-degree on flybar
17mm between frame and swash
servo arms at 90 degrees

I hope this is correct. My current pitch curve (for eclipse 7 radio) is 0-50-100 (percentages).