# Cant let webby have all the fun



## jharkin (Apr 13, 2013)

Taking a break from airplane building to join the fun in rotary world. Maybe in a couple weeks when I get this air born I'll try and get a first flight video. If I don't crash 


This is no drone, so no onboard video...


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## jharkin (Apr 13, 2013)

That frame is all carbon and aluminum with some plastic bits. Only took an hour to get this far.

Next step was building the rotor head. This took over 2 hours of fiddling with tiny screws, greasing bearings, loctiting everything, measuring and aligning. Once its all together there will be more hours of setup, alignment and balancing.


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## jharkin (Apr 13, 2013)

Took a break to pop on the blades and tail boom to get a look. That's a 12in ruler.

This is a "medium size" electric,  and flies on a 2200ma 3 cell lipo battery. These come in sizes small enough to fit in you palm all the way up to monsters with 6+ ft rotors running on gas.


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## jharkin (Apr 13, 2013)




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## jharkin (Apr 21, 2013)

liftoff.


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## Jags (Apr 22, 2013)

Awesome.  That looks like some good fun right there.  Mount a couple of bottle rockets to the skids with electric igniters....


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## fossil (Apr 22, 2013)

JATO  I dare ya.


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## Jags (Apr 23, 2013)

fossil said:


> JATO I dare ya.


 
Gonna have to get a bigger whirly bird.


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## jharkin (Apr 23, 2013)

Ha... Yea I can see myself getting a bigger one eventually. These things are HARD, much harder than learning to fly regular airplanes, as I am sure is true in full size also. The first thing you have to do is learn how to hold it stationary in a hover in all positions (facing away, facing toward you, sideways) and it has a feeling kind of like balancing an egg on the tip of your finger. (unlike the quad rotors this has no gyro stabilization other than the tail rotor/rudder control)


Just like the planes, these model helis are capable of stuff the full scale is not like inverted hovering. To give you an idea of what these are capable of in Pro hands, take a look below. I don't think Id ever even want to try those stunts!


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## Jags (Apr 23, 2013)

That thing is more like a dragon fly than a copter.


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## jharkin (Apr 23, 2013)

Yeah, it is nuts - that's freestyle competition where they are trying to demonstrate the limits of what the machine can do and what a human can keep up with. I wouldn't want to fly like that even if I could.

Here is a video of one of the expert heli pilots at my club flying at our field. This is slightly more sedate...


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## fossil (Apr 23, 2013)




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## Jags (Apr 23, 2013)

That wall landing never ceases to amaze.  Talk about control.


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## BrotherBart (Apr 23, 2013)

Not RC but the real thing. But on the subject of flying the ass off of one...


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## jharkin (Apr 24, 2013)

Flight #8... I have a loooooong way to go.

https://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=10200900472063726


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## Jags (Apr 25, 2013)

Not too bad for only having a little time with it.


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## webbie (Apr 25, 2013)

Like with Golf, I give up before I start...and, yes, you will crash.......although I like your careful approach!

Same with guitar. You can play for years and then watch some a-hole pick the thing up and make it sing sweet......

I give up...on everything! Well, sorta......

I consider myself a test pilot. That is, I am destroying stuff so others don't have to. See what it can do. Yesterday, I took my v959 (toy quad with little camera) up to as high as it could go...but it kept going! I found it about 10 minutes later. Video was a bit corrupted, but you can get the idea....

Pic below shows me as a tiny dot with shadow at the bottom of the screen. Keep in mind that this is a 3 ounce quadcopter....



Here is the vid......

I'l also destroying and pasting together my new heavy iron (2 lb quad). Unfortunately, I am learning what Newton and Galileo opined on.....about falling bodies.  In this case, I am learning a lot about triage. I have pasted stuff back together which should not be back together. Fun!


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## Jags (Apr 25, 2013)

I am guessing that when the camera is pointed towards the sun that is a "bad" thing.


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## jharkin (Apr 25, 2013)

webbie said:


> ..and, yes, you will crash.......although I like your careful approach!


 
Oh I know I will. Ive had some spectacular crashes over the years with the airplanes.  I'm going slow with the heli because the kind of crash you just had on the quad could do well over $100 in damage to this thing, if not destroy it altogether.

Actually I have already had a minor crash.  I landed too hard on flight #6 and the tail rotor hit the ground.  The way this works is like a full scale helicopter, the tail rotor is driven off the main rotor by a belt that runs through the tail boom. You slide the boom in a clamp to set belt tension, and there is a servo motor that drives a rod down the tail to a bell-crank that controls the tail rotor pitch. The tail pitch servo is hooked up to a heading hold gyroscope and that in turn is hooked up to the rudder (yaw) output from the receiver.  The way it works is that the gyroscope senses rotation of the heli and adjust the tail pitch to keep it pointed in the same direction unless it get a rudder/yaw signal from the controller (without it, the tail would bounce all over the place, since the main motor RPM goes up and down as the pitch of the main blades changes under load though maneuvers resulting in changes to the tail rpm).

Ok so why all that explanation?... my "crash" caused the tail belt to slip and the boom to move. I had to reset the boom and re tension the belt. It looks like the pitch control got wacket also because even tigthening everything there is now some play in the tail pitch bellcrank... Its TINY, i mean if you push on the tail blades they will twist about 1/64" or maybe less than a 10th of a degree - but that appears to be enough to cause that tail wagging you see in the video I posted. The gyro send a correction signal to the servo but the slop makes it overshoot and then it dances around. 

Thats one of the things I like about these single rotor helis though. Its all very complex and you have to have everything mechanically perfect, we measure blade angles to a tenth of a degree or less.  Heaven for a MechE geek


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## webbie (Apr 25, 2013)

Jags said:


> I am guessing that when the camera is pointed towards the sun that is a "bad" thing.


 
"I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have
succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work."


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## BrotherBart (Apr 25, 2013)

webbie said:


> "I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have
> succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work."


 
Ah. The scientific method. Proving the null hypothesis.


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## webbie (Apr 25, 2013)

BrotherBart said:


> Ah. The scientific method. Proving the null hypothesis.


 
I think my wife provides the ultimate test. If she cannot understand or use something, then 80% of the population cannot.....


I'm pleased to report that the iphone and ipad actually pass that test. 
Apple TV also. Same with most cars. Most kitchen appliances.
But nothing else....


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## webbie (Apr 25, 2013)

jharkin said:


> Thats one of the things I like about these single rotor helis though. Its all very complex and you have to have everything mechanically perfect, we measure blade angles to a tenth of a degree or less. Heaven for a MechE geek


 
So you are saying you can't take yours for a walk in the woods and leaves like this?


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## begreen (Apr 28, 2013)

That's an expensive leaf blower there chief.


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## jharkin (May 26, 2013)

Well, it was bound to happen.  First big crash on flight #34.  Having graduated to forward flight circuits I was getting ambitious with hover practice and was doing slow pirouettes in the yard (spinning hover in place).  Lost orientation when a big wind gust came through and flew it into a tree.

This thing doesnt bounce like a quad


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## jharkin (May 26, 2013)

$50 or so and a few evenings work we are back in business.


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## webbie (May 26, 2013)

What will that set you back?
My little crashes with the bigger quad were a bit annoying - it was $66 for a new arm because they didn't sell just the parts I needed.


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## webbie (May 26, 2013)

jharkin said:


> $50 or so and a few evenings work we are back in business.
> 
> View attachment 103092


 

Those things don't look like they are meant to fly. Then again, the same is true of most rotor aircraft.


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## jharkin (May 26, 2013)

webbie said:


> What will that set you back?
> My little crashes with the bigger quad were a bit annoying - it was $66 for a new arm because they didn't sell just the parts I needed.


 

That was about a $50 crash. $20 carbon fiber main  rotor blades, $9 for bent main shaft and spindle, $15 for the stabilizer bar and seesaw and $5 for new bearings. 

The cost of parts for these things is relative to the size, if this where a big electric or gas helicopter it would have been a few hundred...


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## BrotherBart (May 26, 2013)

webbie said:


> Those things don't look like they are meant to fly. Then again, the same is true of most rotor aircraft.


 

The reason they cratered some of the V-22 Ospreys. Not using rotary wing pilots.


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## KaptJaq (May 26, 2013)

I know they are just "toys" (like my chainsaws) but this is my fleet.



(Click image for larger view)

The little red one is light and fast but easily pushed around by the slightest breeze. The gold one is a little heavier and easier to maneuver but slow to react. We set up courses around the trees in the yard and race to see who can complete 3 loops first.

They have been attacked by the cats, had hard landings in the trees/bushes, and are held together with glue, solder, and wire. Replacement parts are, except for the blades, impossible to come by so they have been jury-rigged several times.

KaptJaq


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## jharkin (Aug 18, 2013)

Got out for a nice day at the field today, and flew big planes and the helis. Except for a bad sky (lot of grey overcast makes it hard to see the planes well at a distance) weather was about as good as you could ever ask for, high 70s and nearly dead calm at the start with only a lite 5mph breeze picking up later.

I am starting to get the hang of this heli thing and got some video (stay tuned).






One of the good heli pilots was out and let me fly his Goblin. This thing is over twice the size of mine and I was shaking at the thought of loosing concentration and crashing it. One small mishap easily turns into a $400 repair bill on that.

So all I did was hover it in place and do a small lap up the runway. Its veeeery stable though, larger and has a full 3 axis gyro stabilization system. Man oh man I want one.


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## jharkin (Aug 18, 2013)

Here are a couple quick video my flying buddy Jon got of my last flight of the day on the helicopter. Sorry the quality is so bad we where using the phone.

https://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=10201677837377373
(first 3 minutes, then phone ran out of space )

https://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=10201677925899586
(part 2)


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## jharkin (Nov 30, 2013)

Craig really needs to watch out now.  I decided the little helcopter was so much fun, time to get me a big 'un.




one word.


Gasoline...


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## webbie (Dec 2, 2013)

I told dad that even he could fly the Phantom once I got it airborne. This quadcopter has GPS which keeps it hovering in about the same place and centered controls so that when you leave go of the sticks, it stays where it is.

Here's the proof. He flew it!


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## jharkin (Dec 5, 2013)

webbie said:


> I told dad that even he could fly the Phantom once I got it airborne. This quadcopter has GPS which keeps it hovering in about the same place and centered controls so that when you leave go of the sticks, it stays where it is.
> 
> Here's the proof. He flew it!




Nice Craig!

These days even traditional RC helicopters are fully gyro stabilized. There are some GPS guided systems even but we dont see them alot.  In the big guy I am installing a system called the Helicommand 3SX, which is a 3 axis gyro stabilizer that has 3 modes you can select in flight:


 "RIGID" mode for aerobatics which basically just gyro stbilizes aaginst wind drift.
"Hoizon" mode wich is self levelling whenever you let go the controlsand makes it fly as stable as a quadcopter
"Rescue" mode - which is on a spring loaded switch. Any time you hit the switch, no matter what position the helicopter is in, it will level itself upright as fast as possible, and then shoot straight up.  So literlaly if you are upside down and falling toward the ground it will save you.  Use theis to get out of trouble if you get disoriented practicing tricks.

Speaking of the big guy we are getting closer. Almost ready to install the engine and start setting up the electronics


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## Flatbedford (Dec 7, 2013)

Just don't take the top of your head off like the kid in Queens did this summer!


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## jharkin (Dec 8, 2013)

Why does everyone want to tell me that 


Yeah that one was quite a tragedy...  Even worse something similar happened in Switzerland this year as well. Sadly it happens but thankfully is very rare, R/C helicopters like this have been around since the 70s and this is one of hte few really bad accidents I recall... In a way though its gotten more dangerous, used to be you had a big learning curve having to build the thing from parts and practice for years with an instructor to learn how to fly it, which kinda weeded out the impatient and inexperienced.  Not to mention they just didn't have the performance for crazy dangerous stunts.

Now anyone with a credit card can go buy one that is ready to go out of the box and will do tricks like a mad bee on steroids and you have these young kids that like to fly crazy 5 feet in front of their face to impress the crowd. Not thinking about the consequences if something breaks.  I dont and wont fly like that  - I keep it way out at a safe distance all the time and never fly alone.

Same reason that at full scale airshows all the stunts are done parallel to the flight line... if something goes wrong they want the aircraft's momentum to take the crash away from the spectators.


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## jharkin (Dec 15, 2013)

Now I just have to wait for the snow to melt........


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## jharkin (Dec 22, 2013)

It hit nearly 60F yesterday so I couldn't resist the chance to go out and test fly it.  I was at our club field with my friend/helicopter mentor Raja  who helped check it out.

4 great flights for about 1 hour of flight time on a half gallon of regular 2 stroke mix pump gas.  This is just toooooooo much fun.

the videos below are of Raja flying.  I didn't get video of me yet.  No crazy tricks, just breaking in the engine and checking it out so far...


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## begreen (Dec 22, 2013)

Pretty fine for a maiden flight.


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## webbie (Dec 22, 2013)

I'm flying this thing in the house just to keep up with my stick moves.....


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## jharkin (Dec 23, 2013)

Your photo didnt come through Craig....


Hey I dont know anything about it first hand, but they made a quad with one motor driving variable pitch props (actually repurposed helicopter tail rotors)  that can fly inverted and do full aerobatics:

http://www.helidirect.com/curtis-youngblood-stingray-500-3d-quad-combo-kit-p-32958.hdx


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## webbie (Dec 23, 2013)

Here is that photo....

Yeah, I heard of that machine! A bit rich for my blood......the Phantom I have was $450 and has a digital compass, GPS, return to home, some barometer functions, programmability and can carry a fairly heavy camera. I don't think it does flips, though....


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## jharkin (Dec 31, 2013)

Wow, I just saw that in my latest model aviation magazine, its the little Estes one?  $39 bucks???  wow.  might have to get one for kicks.



This was my New Years Eve  fun.    22 degrees out but we were having a ball. Electric heated gloves rule!


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## BrotherBart (Dec 31, 2013)

Attend Drone University.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/31/drone-technology-uav-unmanned-aircraft/3683835/


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## begreen (Dec 31, 2013)

A friend's son recently graduated from North Dakota's Drone school program and now is working for Boeing. There are going to be a lot of jobs in this field.

NPR had a broadcast on this yesterday. 6 sites have been chosen for testing commercial applications of drones.
http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258548351/commercial-drone-testing-sites-chosen-by-faa
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...est-sites-chosen-for-commercial-drone-testing


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## webbie (Dec 31, 2013)

jharkin said:


> Wow, I just saw that in my latest model aviation magazine, its the little Estes one?  $39 bucks???  wow.  might have to get one for kicks.



Yeah, thats the estes.
People are not enamored with it as it's set up to be somewhat disposable (they don't sell parts).....but you can get around all that. Also, it works much better with a bigger TX (the hubsan tx)....you should have a Hubsan too. For 45 or so, you can fly some inside and have fun!


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## fossil (Dec 31, 2013)

I want one of these.

http://www.dji.com/


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## begreen (Dec 31, 2013)

What's it run for?


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## fossil (Dec 31, 2013)

No idea, but I have more money than I know what to do with.  

Seriously, there's a link to buy directly from the Mfr, but you have to establish an account before you can get into the showroom.  Haven't done that.  I don't imagine these particular models are exactly dirt cheap.


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## fossil (Dec 31, 2013)

$1200.00 from B&H Photo:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/999838-REG/dji_djphvision_phantom_vision.html

Hmmm...


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## BrotherBart (Dec 31, 2013)

I bought an RC Chinook and it has trimmed the top out of most of the trees around the yard. 

Flying from the ground is, well, different.


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## begreen (Jan 1, 2014)

fossil said:


> $1200.00 from B&H Photo:
> http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/999838-REG/dji_djphvision_phantom_vision.html
> 
> Hmmm...



I'd follow webbie's guidance and get a cheap model to learn on first.


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## begreen (Feb 9, 2014)

A drone in every home?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2014/02/08/tech-now-personal-drones/5264883/


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## Hills Hoard (Feb 9, 2014)

jharkin said:


> View attachment 99492
> View attachment 99493



Looking great.!!..

helicopters freak me out though....!


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## begreen (Feb 9, 2014)

Had a friend that owned a helicopter up in AK. He took me on some of the most spectacular rides of my life up on top of glaciers, over and around peaks and valleys. Your stomach does do a little flip now and then but it was so worth it.


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## Hills Hoard (Feb 9, 2014)

begreen said:


> Had a friend that owned a helicopter up in AK. He took me on some of the most spectacular rides of my life up on top of glaciers, over and around peaks and valleys. Your stomach does do a little flip now and then but it was so worth it.



I bet it was...sounds amazing...!


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## Warm_in_NH (Feb 9, 2014)

Have a $20 indoor one from amazon. Love it, easy and simple once you get it and very durable.  Has survived multiple rottweiler attacks as well as cat attacks. 

In no time I started getting the itch for an upgrade and now I find this thread. Interesting. ...


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## jharkin (Feb 9, 2014)

Hey guys!!  We have been out flying all winter still in spite of the weather. We have heated radio transmitter muffs that run off the car battery to keep warm... My buddy even took a snowblower down to the airfield to clear out our helipad. Good times.


Since last time I did some modifications and rigged up navigation lights  this was me yesterday just flying around slow to show off the lights.  Up to 5 hours air time on it yet but it still intimidates me to try anything too crazy



My friend/mentor Raja was having a lot of fun with his... landing into the snowbank, imitating a snowblower, doing acrobatic autorotations...







I dont even bother to fly the little electric one anymore....


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## blazincajun (Feb 11, 2014)

Going, going, gone - sorry I think it is kind of humourous. Hope you can get it fixed.


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## Warm_in_NH (Feb 16, 2014)

Lost a blade last night due to a dog encounter. Jammed it back on, slight vibration,  flies fine. Definitely on borrowed time for a $20 machine. 
When it gets mundane in the house I leave the ceiling fan on and fly around the stove room. Between the fan and the stove it gets a little hairy,  throw in a 100# playful pup and I feel like I'm flying a drone through a war zone.


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## jharkin (Apr 24, 2014)

the dark side of expensive toys... Last week the tail gearbox ate itself in flight. When that happens you have to react quick, kill the motor and glide it down for an autorotation landing before it starts spinning out of control.

I coulda saved it but I still havent completely learned emergency autorotation landings and didn't think to turn into the wind and it hit hard with a strong tailwind bouncing causing the main blades to strike the tail boom.


ouch.


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## BrotherBart (Apr 24, 2014)

If I just have to have a tail rotor gearbox failure I would sure prefer that it be in an RC.


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## jharkin (Apr 26, 2014)

BrotherBart said:


> If I just have to have a tail rotor gearbox failure I would sure prefer that it be in an RC.


Yeah I dont think Id want to be riding in a real one that lost the tail.  Sure they can kill power and autorotate down but that's got to be a wild roller coaster ride when your on the inside.

Little ones are simpler to fix.  3-4 hours work and $100 in parts and we are almost good as new.


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## Flatbedford (Apr 26, 2014)

jharkin said:


> .
> Little ones are simpler to fix.  3-4 hours work and $100 in parts and we are almost good as new.



...and no next of kin to notify.


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