The E-flite Blade 400 is -or was - a really great helicopter, bumped off its perch of prominence by the Blade 450 and now, the insane Blade 500.

People have been lamenting the stock servos for years; they don't even respond as well as the very affordable, metal-geared Turnigy servos in my HK 450TT Pro.

The forward cyclic servo decided it was going to go blooey a couple of weeks ago. I have more stick time on that 400 than almost anything else I own and I knew soon after liftoff that something wasn't right.

The inevitable crash which was only the fourth one in its history was relatively low speed and from a low altitude, but it wasn't until I started dissecting the thing that I realized there was hidden damage, things like a slightly bent tail boom and a main drive gear with a couple of teeth knocked out.

Money heals all crashes and after a reasonably priced cash infusion, it's back.

Sort of.

I upgraded the firmware in the Castle Creations Phoenix-35 while I was putting everything back together.

So, the ESC has the very latest firmware...and now the throttle curve is completely weirded out. It lifted off just fine, but the head speed wasn't nearly as fast as it should have been. Changing the governor setting helped a bit, but it still lacks that marvelous head speed that an E-flite 440 helicopter motor can generate and has generated in the very recent past.

Tweaking the throttle curve on a DX6i is no big deal, but I have a friend who is, quite...Continue Reading