Remote Control Model Helicopter - Maplin

[MSG]

bought one the other day from maplin, £22.00 reduced from £39.99, brilliant and has a very good lift off, lifts your arm up if you try to hold it in your hands1

Can't fly it indoors as it requires a lot of room, can't even fly in the gardens because it drifts away into the neighbouring gardens, then try and reterive from someone's garden!

Took it to a large shopping centre car park when deserted with just a few cars, it took off so high and started to drift away and landed on top of a roof of a Next store! damn I thought I have lost it!! send the command again and it lifted off and managed to land in the loading bay of Next and I had to convince the security through a barrier to allow me in to reterive my helicopeter that had to make an emergency landing in their loading bay! the guy was a bit baffeled and then I said its a toy helicopeter! he allowed me in to reterive it.

Then took it to aopen fields and where I pushed it to its limits and it climed really very high, probably about 500 feet or over, until it was just a dot, but by the time I could bring it down it had adrifted good 1/4 mile, so quite a bit of excersise this weekend just gone. Oh if you keep following it looking up watch out for the dog ****es everywhere and my shoes were covered in all that stupid dog poo in the open fields!!!

Anybody else had any experience in these things, I can't seem to control the drift, it cannot be controlled to come back to you, it just drifet with the cross wind!!!


BTW, its got a very powerfull motor and whe the blades are snapped, I could convert it into .....you guessed it right!! Electric supercharger!!

[JoeyB]

I bought an indoor one from Novatech for about £22. It goes up and down and you can make it spin but no other control really. I haven't taken it to a field yet - tbh, i had forgotten about it.

I may try it this weekend....

[MSG]

As it has a fair bit of lift, I will have to put an extra forward thrust motor and a propeller to make it move in a circle so that despite the drift it will eventually circloe back to you, worth a try later.

[LEE69]

I saw them today, i hardly use mine.
Was sorely tempted with the remote control tarantula though

[astraracer19]

I saw the advert, but wasnt sure how good it would be. I think im going to buy one now

[JoeyB]

My inlaw has a Helicopter fetish at the moment. He keeps 'winning' them on eBay.

He bought one for about £110 notes from a model shop - its awesome - you have complete control over it, really difficult to master but usable indoors (just). He then went and won a monster outdoor petrol powered jobby (thats never been flown). He then bought a brute from a model shop which he started up in the lounge (even though its an outdoor copter), you should have seen the air it moved lol...he then tried to take off in the lounge and promptly put a burn mark in the carpet where it toppled over.

[l337 calibra]

Is it one of these MSG?

http://s8.photobucket.com/albums/a48...t=MOV00006.flv

All it seems to do is hover or turn in a circle

[JoeyB]

Thats all mine does. You do get what you pay for.

[MSG]

Originally Posted by JoeyB

My inlaw has a Helicopter fetish at the moment. He keeps 'winning' them on eBay.

He bought one for about £110 notes from a model shop - its awesome - you have complete control over it, really difficult to master but usable indoors (just). He then went and won a monster outdoor petrol powered jobby (thats never been flown). He then bought a brute from a model shop which he started up in the lounge (even though its an outdoor copter), you should have seen the air it moved lol...he then tried to take off in the lounge and promptly put a burn mark in the carpet where it toppled over.

No its not the same, what you have is a small indoor usable, mine is far too big the blades span across 20" and the length from the front tip of the blade to the fin tail blade tip is 26"
and the lift is phnomenol, it just keeps on rising and till it becomes like a tiny bird in the sky!

i will have some pictures put on here. For £22.00 you can't really go wrong but when the other day as it rose up so high, in that retail park car park, from where I was standing and the breeze blew it 500 yards away, where the the retail store buildings start with the Next Retail being the first one followed by JD Suports etc. , I couldn't eye the distance from where I was as it really had gone so far over, but I estimated that it hadn't yet reached over the roof area, so I made it to come down before it gets adrift beyond recovery, but it was already over the roof area so when I tried bring it down it landed on top of the Next retail's roof!! and went out of line of sight as you really can't see the top of the roof can you from a ground level.

Then as it did, my heart sank! I thought I have lost that helicopter, because depending if it had a rough landing on its side then the blades will not turn and it won't lift off again, as landing it softly is a very skill full task, you really got to bring it down very slowly or it nearly always tips to its side on a rough landing.

It would have been impossible to get on top of those roofs! even if you could it would be very dangerous and highly unlikely anybody would allow me to go up there!!! 30 or more feet high industrial blocks, So my only hope was that the helicopter had landed upright and safe, and if it landed on the edge of the corrogated roofing sheets then it would have most certainly have tipped over to its side!!

So I ran towards the building, getting a bit closer might help with the remote control signal, and I send the command to lift off and was so pleased that after a few seconds I saw my helicopter air born again and still drifting but this time the drift took it towards the rear of the building blocks and I then landed it safely into the loading bay of the Next Retail, finally I got it back safely. Had musch fun, excitement, and at one point had my heart sunk!!!

Better feelings then drifting in a Cally!

[cambridge]

is it a 3 channel job?

[MSG]

Here it is 2 channel job mate.

[Trevor]

I used to fly one of these, a Concept 30 DX, but the parts and running costs were quite high when I gave up flying RC models 15 years ago. Gyro-stabilisers were just coming in then, you did your torque yaw manually with the rudder stick! 7 channel RC on this puppy, the RC gear cost £400 18 years ago!

I still have it and by the look of it spares are quite affordable now........

[JoeyB]

MSG -Thats the same as the father in laws....i use the term indoor loosely as you can only work in about a 6ft square lol

Your one is the same size as his smallest one by the looks of it. His is at least 3 channel i think. It cost just over £100 from what i remember...

Trevor - Thats the size of the one he unexpectedly won off eBay. It will probably never see use as its too much for him as a beginner.

[Station]

Had one of those small ones. They just spin on the floor and occasionally lift off into the wall.

[cambridge]

2 channel.... sod taking that outdoors then.

[lee303]

on the little ones, to get some forward flight rather than just up and down, either weight the nose or get a bit of tape, fold the top 1/2 of it over on itself along its length, so you have the bottom of the tape still sticky, then wrap this around the top of the nose, leaving the folded over part to make a 'scoop' on the nose to pick up some of the downdraft off the blades and give some forward motion, you can then fly it around the room if you practice enough

[MSG]

Originally Posted by Trevor

I used to fly one of these, a Concept 30 DX, but the parts and running costs were quite high when I gave up flying RC models 15 years ago. Gyro-stabilisers were just coming in then, you did your torque yaw manually with the rudder stick! 7 channel RC on this puppy, the RC gear cost £400 18 years ago!

I still have it and by the look of it spares are quite affordable now........

That one looks a proper job as well! is it petrol driven?

[MSG]

Originally Posted by lee303

on the little ones, to get some forward flight rather than just up and down, either weight the nose or get a bit of tape, fold the top 1/2 of it over on itself along its length, so you have the bottom of the tape still sticky, then wrap this around the top of the nose, leaving the folded over part to make a 'scoop' on the nose to pick up some of the downdraft off the blades and give some forward motion, you can then fly it around the room if you practice enough

I will be trying those ideas then mate. cheers

[astra-nige]

one of my dads friends has had loads of these he had one with 6 ft span of blades(a lynx i think) and he had radio interferance on the first flight and it just slammed into the ground from about 10 foot of the floor it was a proper state, he was fairly pissed obviously it cost him a bloody fortune and had took him a year to build

[MSG]

Just measured the Helicopter's total lifting ability, I placed it on a digital 5Kg Kitchen scale platter and sellotaped it to the scale's platter, on the first instance it ripped the tapes off and lifted up with a force and banged against the ceiling!!!

On second attempt, I sellotaped more elaborately and it showed 430gms lift, modified the blades using masking tape just widened the blades a bit and it lifted 470gms, excellent lift.

Obviously when you place the copter on the scale you have to zero the reading and then then take the reading when you command it to lift off, which will be minus reading as the scale is registering a negative load.

The motor gets fairly hot! after about 2 minutes continuous running the lift goes down to 400gm and steadily declines as the charge on the batteries is being consumed

The Helicopter itself weighs 268gms, thus the total lifting capacity is 738gms!!

But, make no mistake,the results are based on at the ground level helicopter sitting on a pad (the scale's platter) and hence the lift is at greatest, when air born the lift declines and the lifting capacity reduces by more than 50% and this woulod also depend on the air density and the air temperature, hence why even the real helicopters can't fly past a certain altitude.

[Trevor]

Originally Posted by MSG

That one looks a proper job as well! is it petrol driven?

Glow fuel. OS 32H

[MSG]

Thats what you need the model aircraft engine! I have played around with them years ago on model airplanes, used to be really good, but in those days the remote controls were a bit dodggy and the plane left the signal coverage and was never seen again!!!

Also there used to be hackers who would park in nearby and take over the controls and many planes were forced to crash!! it was even the papers and the police were alerted to swop on these culprits!

[MSG]

This a 4 channel control apache helicopter model with a very nice video demo , £79.00

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?...wVid=1&doy=3m4

[the flash]

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/APACHE-4-CH-AH...QQcmdZViewItem

51quid here