Greetings to all,

The wife bought me a Colco 4-channel Apache, co-axial a couple Christmas' ago.....I puttered around with it but never could get the thing off the ground.

My son recently took an interest in it while visiting, so we fooled with it some, got new batteries etc...but still no go. Once we got it about 3 feet up, but after landing, no go. It seems something was binding the lower rotors, we took the whole heli apart, but found nothing binding. "swash plate" is a sliding swash, and we have adjusted it as it appeared it might be rubbing, but nothing works.

Can anyone give me some more troubleshooting steps, I would really like to get this thing up for him to play with....then look around for a budget bird for myself to play with.

Thanks in advance for the help!

I am a newbie myself.. however i had have a problem like yours.. i have a 4 channel esky and after a bumping landing I notice that i was not getting any lift from the heli. I noticed that my top pair of rotors were not turning as fast as the bottom set. When i took my heli apart I noticed that my servo gear for the top rotor was not making contact all the time .. So i took the gear off from the top shaft.. reseeded it and made sure it was locked in tight.. maybe you are having the same problem just with the lower one..and the other part of the shaft.. Hope this helps a little..


anthony

Seriously, you can mess with your Colco all you want, and it still wont fly right. I had one and after hours and hours, gave up on the thing. If you want an easy to fly, and "ready to fly" heli right out of the box, I would suggest the eflite Blade CX2 or CX3. It is very affordable at $149.99, and comes complete with everything! Even a 2.4GHZ programmable Transmitter. Highly recommend buying the training set landing gear. Use the training set until you get a proper feel for the controls. The training set is only 10 bucks, and well worth it, to avoid blade breaking crashes. Hope this helps. The new CX3 comes stock with proper 3 in 1 mixing and is great for kids, and beginners to advanced pilots !

Thanks for the suggestions, I will check the shafts, gears etc....still want to try and fly this bird. Also will look for a good used bird....not a lot of $ right now for a new one, so if anyone out there has a copter that I can learn on, a good beginners model, preferably somthing I can fly outdoors, our place is way too small for inside flying, the Colco is huge inside our place! Let me know please.

Thanks again,
John

You can check hobby shops in your area.. some of them sell used things that are in good shape. I check Craigslist all the time.. You never know when you might find someone who bought something nice.. gave up trying to learn and now wants to get rid of them... Knowing what i know now about heli's i would of started out with the eflite cx2