Hello,
Anyone have any experiance or advice on Heli floats. I think it would be a fun addition to my fixed wing float flying. I had seen them available through Century but they were marketed as "lifesaving, emergency only".
I was thinking about something that I can use a bit more regularly.........
Any ideas would be great. Thanks.

I got my floats from heliproz. They are awsome. I fly more off the water than the land. I still do all the aerobatics that I do on land too. I would have thought the floats would mess that up.

Last time I flew it, I even did an auto to the water, no splash. Pretty cool.

Give it a try, you will love it. Just make sure to get it all cleaned up when done so you don't have a rust problem in bearings.

The big thing to remember with a helicopter on floats is that the floats MUST be long enough to support the weight of the machine at rest on the water.

There is a simple test; turn the main blades parallel with the boom, and set the machine onto the water's surface. If the tail drops, your floats aren't long (or buoyant) enough. So when the ship is sitting on the water, as long as the head speed is at or just below hover rpm, gyroscopic precession will keep the tail up. But as soon as you spool the head down, the tail will drop into the water, with predictable results.

Most of the available (all, as a matter of fact, that I have seen) after-market floats are rather cheesy and cheap. There are many things to make your own out of. Two-liter Coke bottles are probably the best, flotation-wise, but they look ridiculous. Lots of guys have used a chunk of the open-cell foam "pool noodles" with great success. A friend of mine scratched out a beautiful set from styrofoam and lite ply, which he then glassed. Another good friend, Greg McNair, scratched out a scale set for his Vario Bell 47 gasser; all 23 pounds of it. They look and work great.

Your imagination is your only limit.


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Thanks for the replies. I have a bunch of pool noodles. Looks like I just found a real use for them....

I just went out and tried a couple of noodles. They're about 2 feet long and 3 inches thick. I set the heli in the pool and it started to sink on the right side and the tail was in the water about 2 inches. The heli weighs more than I tend to think.
How big are the floats from Heliproz??? Length and width of each float and distance they are apart would be great.
I have some noodles that are 5 inches thick but I figured that would look stupid. Maybe that is what is necessary for correct floatation.

Sorry, but the only personal experience I have is with the old Schluter inflatable yellow floats- which Hobbico copied directly and still offer, AFAIK.

Those floats provided enough buoyancy, but were too short. That's how I found out about the need to keep the tail out of the water...

This was on a Concept 30.

I should have mentioned that it seems to me the open-cell foam stuff would need to have a lot more comparative surface area than a solid or inflatable float. Looks like that is the case. But I have seen the smaller noodles on machines at fly-ins, and the owners said they floated fine. So, I dunno...


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Here is a pic of my Titan on "pool noodle floats" only just made them and decided to see if it would float in the bath and as you can see even with the blades folded back the tail is still out of the water. Now i just have to testfly on land before comitting it to the briny blue for the first time. when I evenyually try it will post more pics and a bit of a story on how it goes