Hi Guys

In need of advice again. I am new to helicopters, that said i thought i was going down the learning road at a good pace. Then a screw came out of the heli and down it came. The result £60 of damage. I am in the UK by the way!! Heli back together i sought the advice of a club some 60 miles from my home. They trimmed the heli out and back to practicing i went. The members at the club felt that the Shuttle i had was very loose, apparently this makes it difficult to lean on. I was also running the motor rich as i would in a plane which they also said was wrong. Back home in my local park i went to practice. all went well for the first couple of days, then i leaned the motor out. The shuttle was almost unflyable for me! I opened the throttle and up it went 35 feet in the air. Slowly i cut the throttle and even with only -1 degree of negative pitch it dropped like a stone. Again i throttled up this time it shot up to 50 feet. By now i new i was in proper trouble. Any not to bore you any longer there is over £110 of damage.

My Question then. Given the fact that in the UK a new shuttle kit is £159 would it benefit me to buy a new shuttle or are they all loose even from new?

The alternative is to buy a Raptor 30 kit at £210 and swap my gear and motor which is an O.S.32 across. I still have a mechanical gyro is this advisable to use.

Option 3 is to give up and go back to being a plank flier.

What would you do??????????????????

Hope to here from some of you soon.

Thanks for the advice i know i will get in advance.

Paul

If budget permits, a simulator would be good aside from fixing your heli. I learned on a shuttle so quality of the base kit is not the issue, but maybe setup is. I suggest you do your hover training in a field with other heli flyers so they may guide you. The moment you can hover confidently on your own, you can probably continue learning again in the local park where you prefer.

Crashing sucks to be sure, but just suck it in and persevere, if you do, you will be greatly rewarded.

When you leaned your engine up you created more power. This in turn would have increased your rotor headspeed making the Heli much more crisp. The usual 1/2 stick hover that you probably had turned into a rather abrupt lift. All your controls would have responded much smoother and quicker with the raised head speed! Could not have been that loose. Sounds like you were learning at your own pace quite fine. There is a lot of older Shuttles out there still teaching people to fly.
I will have a rather biased opinion I love Shuttles. A lot of the parts you have will interchange with the newer kits maybe. Do you own an original Shuttle with the blue canopy or white canopy or do you have A Z or ZX ? The one new for 159 is that the Z-TS or the shuttle plus?

Hi. The shuttle i have is a bottom start or belt start type shuttle. It is a zx model. The shuttle i can get for £159 is the T-ZX.

I would love to get a simulator, but i'm a Mac man and there is none to my knowledge available. So it's training for real for me!

Paul

I would get the Z-TS you have so many extra parts already. When you get it all built gently play with the collective find your hover zone. You can't quit yet or ever

Hi,
I agree with hiroboz , only see if you can get the Shuttle plus.
It is actually a little better than the ts, but it is cheaper. It just became available here in the States. I think the Shuttle is much easier to learn on that a Rapt. It is a lot smoother flying. Also can you get Ray's helli manual there? It would be a big help in set up.

i learned on a shuttle too. they don't jump up 35 feet unless your throttle is wide open and they certainly won't drop like a stone at -1 degree collective. check your pitch/throttle curves and try to level them out somewhat at mid-stick if you have enough set points on your tx. either way, it's practically her first time--be gentle on the throttle collective stick.

The shuttle plus is £50 more expensive in the uk than the T-ZX. Yes i have got a new copy of Rays Helicopter manual. The pitch was definitely -1 to +8 and it was rechecked when i went to a heli club the weekend before. As to the relationship between the throttle and the pitch that was set to the figures in the shuttle manual. I will admit that i relied on them settings in the manual as i would not no any better. There was no wind so i can not even blame that. I can tell you Barbary it did drop like a stone as the smashed undercarriage and the snapped training gear will confirm to my cost.

Paul

hmmm... the experienced pilot who flew my first shuttle for the first time after i had trimmed it out had to fly a wide circle around himself to wait for it to descend 20 feet to land. then he took out a pitch gage and showed me that i had only -1 degree at low stick. i took it down to -3 and had no problem with boom strikes while learning to hover. it sounds like your throttle trim may be set too low, which would slow your head on descent and not give your engine enough room to recover before you bottomed out.

The more people replay the more sense i can make of it all. All i need now is a new heli and one of you to move to the UK and i have cracked it.

Paul

I think you will crack it on your own you've already got it beat by the sounds of it.
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Listen to Barbary though, increase your throttle throughout the lower part of the collective stick. If you take your Heli up and stop the blades dead what would happen. It would drop like a stone no matter what the pitch.
What radio do you fly with???

Thats the other problem! The radio i am using is Sanwa,and i have no instructions. I have put a post on here and i believe someone is sending instructions to me in the post. This should help. If all else fails i will change the radio and put Futaba in and use my FF8 TX. I have played with the heli setting on the 8 , but messed up all my plane settings. I was very p***** off as the pattern ship i fly took me best part of six months to fly that right.

If it was easy it would by boring!!!!!!!!!!!!

Paul