Mine had its first "flight" tonight. Hardly a flight it was mostly checking blade tracking(strapped down) and hovering inside the garage( yikes ).. I let my friend thats way more qualified do that.

We made a few small tweaks ( moved my cyclic servo balls one hole in he didn't like how I had mine ) Re-did the zero pitch and checked everything over. Blade tracking was perfect. One blade needed a small bit of tape on its center of mass point to balance them perfect. I guess I did a pretty good job for building my first heli we didn't have to change much!

He hovered it in rate mode and the tail was good. Hovered in Heading hold. All good and ready for me to try it at the field this weekend.



The only real complaints I have about the kit and build are.
1. The canopy fit like crap it was about 2" to narrow and warped to hell. I used a hairdryer and heat it up and made it better but its all cracking and just sucks.
2. The head spindle it came with had something wrong with it dont know if it got cnc'd wrong but it had a bad wobble that I could see by turning it by hand. I replaced it with this upgrade/new version and its perfect now. http://tarot-rc-heli.com/Tarot_RC_He...r-holder-black
3. One of the tail control plastic arms bound pretty bad where the plastic was thicker than the brass spacer inside it. I sanded it down a bit by hand with some fine sand paper and its fine.
4. The servo horns are complete trash, super brittle, and the splines are a weird size no idea what to replace them with. I broke 3 out of the 4 that you are supposed to use just by reaming them very carefully with a drill.. but it had some dual sided ones so we clipped one side and used those instead. Also due to the servo horns sucking I had to drill the hole out slightly larger than the ball end threads or they would just snap when you tried threading it in so you need 2mm nuts to hold it together.

I would buy it again though. Nothing super major and it seems really nice.

I can't wait to fly it myself at the field this weekend.

Cool...

One thing though - NEVER strap or tie a helicopter down. The problem is that the landing gear are not designed to hold the helicopter DOWN, they are designed to hold the helicopter UP. So, when the screw comes loose, what usually happens is the helicopter suddenly tilts to one side - and at that point the force vectors become impossible to deal with and you have a big safety problem. If you must do this, strap it to the frame, but be ready for the head to come flying off if you do that. It isn't designed to pull on itself.

How else do you suggest checking blade tracking? seen a bunch of videos on how to do it.

I bring the helicopter into a hover and listen to the blades. I can hear when they are out of track - then I make an adjustment and hover again to see if it's better or worse. You want a normal amount of load on your blades when checking the tracking, and strapping it down and increasing the load above normal might actually cause you to set the tracking wrong.

Ok thanks. They were perfect anyway. He said it was hovering perfectly. I'll post up how it goes on saturday morning when its my turn hah. Will try to get video. The only thing we had to do was a small adjustment to my tail link rod length to get it to hover in rate mode without rotating to one side. Not that I will ever use rate mode

First flight out of the way. First Crash out of the way too.

It flys awesome! rock solid. Apparently I can't land! LOL.

So here is what happened some bad things to start with.

-Wind was to my back...so I had to pitch the tail down to land...bad.
-Im not used to the crazy sensitive pitch/throttle really touchy compared to my MCPX.
-I was flying over gravel
-I was so nervous my legs were shaking like crazy.

Clipped tail blew out tail gears on landing went into spin my instinct had me flip throttle hold and slam the left sick down causing it to hit HARD and blow both landing gear skids off.

Heli stayed upright, main blades never hit the ground. But they are chipped up from the dust storm of dirt and gravel being blown up into them. I will get new ones.

All I need is new tail gears & tail blades, new landing skids and a new servo horn for the tail. I actually have everything here exept the servo horn and landing gear.

Everything else seems fine.

I am uploading video now



On a side note I was so bummed about this, I grabbed my MCPX "I'm doing a loop until I break this too"
My friend was like lol ok.

First TRY! did a loop and then another loop!

That sound when I blow the tail gears...make me cringe.

Tarot 450 PRO V2 FBL (4 min 0 sec)

Looks like it was working good before the crash. Always try to land somewhere smooth...

Yea it was working great. I'm going to tone down the pitch curve a bit. Also going to spend all day tomorrow just flying the MCPX in idle up mode, and landing over and over and over. I think i have formed a bad habit of landing anyway when its not looking good. instead of gathering myself and landing.

I ordred new parts for the Tarot so it will be back in the air next weekend.

Ahhh, gotta laugh! Or we'd be so mad all the time....

Originally Posted by shahram72

Ahhh, gotta laugh! Or we'd be so mad all the time....

So true I've bashed a pile of helis learning to fly....... KTMDirtFace nice heli sorry about the prang. When you get it out next get it up a little higher to give yourself some breathing room & time to react. You want it furthest away from the one thing that can kill it... the ground... Trust me we have all done that get into a bad situation & then give it full negative to make sure we finish it off

My buddy & I were flying the other night & he decides to try a first ever attempt at nose in & he's 2 feet off the ground!! His idea is if it goes bad it won't drop too far & I say at 2' if it goes bad it will scatter.

Cam

Lol thanks, yea its kinda funny now watching the video at least it flew awesome no wobbles or tail wag or anything.

At least I have the MCPX while I wait for 450 parts. Attempted some flips and inverts for the first time...most of them didn't make it onto video ( hard to film that little thing )

Blade MCPX V2 Flipping and Invert (1 min 17 sec)

Recommend you do some reading while you are waiting for the new parts or you will be re-ordering and re-ordering and re-ordering. Unfortunately the TT is VERY unforgiving for any kind of a tail strike - even more unforgiving is replacing those gears. They are really a PAIN!

Recommended reading:

Don't Touch The Controls

3D Is Not For Everyone

Phoenix Simulator Flight School

Thanks seen your threads before I'll be fine Just need to practice in a better smoother landing spot and calm down. Lots of wind didn't help.

I have real flight 6 and 250+ flights on my MCPX.