Thursday, April 12th, 2007:
Earlier this week, the wife & I bought a barbecue grill. What does this have to do with helis you ask? Well, you see, the grill was boxed with *a lot* of styrofoam packing. It just so happened that I was looking at this big pile of styrofoam, and a thought came to me… Why not make my own training skids out of this stuff. I was on a mission… I found two lengths of material that were the exact same size, and went about cutting them into identical sized “skids”. They looked more like floats, actually. 
Rather ugly if I do say so myself. Anyways, since I’m the only one who cares what it looks like at this point, I decided to attach them to the machine, making sure that the CG was still directly under the main shaft. I attached them using toothpicks, which I shoved into the styrofoam floats skids, and then (using duct-tape) attached the toothpicks to the skid struts… America’s ugliest helis, here I come!
Saturday, April 7th, 2007:
Today I made my first flight. Unintentionally. Scared the living stuff out of me, to say the least! I was on the front porch at home, and was having a great time watching my little heli go back & forth in front of me on the cement. I was practicing following a specific path in an attempt to get a feel for coordinating the rudder and throttle. I was giving it just enough power (around half throttle) to make it light enough to move. I was trying to have it follow a joint in the walkway, when I accidently pushed the throttle the wrong way… I heard the motor spool up fast, and the heli jumped off the ground! Fortunately I have fast reflexes, and was able to shut it down quickly, before it got more than a few inches off the ground. No damage, thank God! Boy, was my pulse racing! I put it away for the day after that, so that my frazzled nerves could calm down… Lesson learned; *don’t forget which way is off*! Got it!
April 3rd, 2007:
As soon as I got my heli, I opened the box, made sure that everything was there, set the heli on the floor in my office at work, turned on the transmitter, connected the battery to the heli (after ensuring the throttle was at minimum setting), and marveled at how the servos responded. Oooooh! Aaaah! Then… I added a touch of power. Not much, mind you, just enough to get the blades moving so that I could be sure everything worked. I could not wait to get home and try some limited ground maneuvering.
Once home, I immediately took out my heli, powered up the Tx & the heli, and let the games begin! Since I didn’t (at that time) have training gear, I was very cautious with the controls. I started by adding just enough power to make the heli slightly light on the skids; which, by the way was about 30-40% power. I found that if I applied forward cyclic, that the rudder gained much more authority, and I was able to practice turning my bird. By adding just a little bit more power I was able to get it to slide (barely) forward across the carpet. Did I have any close calls that day? At the time I would have said yes, but as I think back on it, I think it was just my lack of experience making me nervous; I would get scared when the heli would tilt more that a few degrees, and kill the power. Eventually I ran the battery down, and that ended my first day’s flight. The following few days consisted of pretty much the same thing. Practice ground-taxi maneuvering, drain battery, charge battery, and repeat.
Hey there!
Yep, another blog… Just what the world needs, eh? well I hope this one won’t be completely boring, but you be the judge of that!
I decided to start this thing to chronicle my adventure in the world of r/c helicopters. I intend the layout to be something like a pilot’s logbook, so that we can all benefit from my experiences, both good and bad.