I was just playing with a toy my kid got from his granma this afternoon (an E-chargers "Helicopter", really a gyroplane) and I wondered why I hadn't seen anything here about gyroplanes as park flyers. The little toy one my son has needed a couple mods to make it fly decently, but once fixed it flew fairly stable and slow. I did a search for the word gyro across the whole electrics forum, and only came up with results in the helos board. Has anyone flown one? How hard are they to scratchbuild, seeing as there's no need for a swashplate and all that crazy cyclic (or is it collective) mess? Trim on this little one is taken care of my elevons on the extra-wide tail, I'm assuming a model could be controlled in a similar fasion. CoG seems to be a no-brainer, just put it directly under the rotor hub, at least that's how this little one is set up.

I'm just a newbie tossing out ideas, but I'm wondering how hard it really would be to make one up. Maybe I can get some balsa and try working one up when the wind's too high to fly the Tipsy that's on it's way.

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showt...threadid=34291

Hmmmm... gyrostick...
http://www.nyblimp.com/litestick/gyro.htm

Ths may be worth further looking into. Seems easy enough to do. I guess I need to find some Balsa and some big meat trays for wings and rotors.

DJV have a look here:

http://www.rcuniverse.com/forumdispl...s=&forumid=137

and here:

http://www.rcuniverse.com/showthread...170&forumid=75

Now and again their server seems foobar'd but it is worth looking at.

Cheers,