Journal Alioth's Journal: T-Rex 500
Sod the credit crunch. I just got myself a new RC helicopter, a T-Rex 500 ESP. It comes as a kit, and I got it on Saturday and had it almost complete by Sunday evening. However, I needn't have rushed, because the weather looks terrible for the next few days.
Compared to my current HDX-300 heli, it looks huge. The rotor disc is just under 1 metre, and it's powered by a big chunky brushless motor and vast Li-Poly battery (actually, two of them in series). It's no wonder Align (the maker of the T-Rex series) has such a good reputation - the engineering is beautiful, everything fits together perfectly, with no slop in the rotor head whatsoever. This kit has a shaft driven tail (most helis use a belt) which hopefully will be more efficient, I think the belt tends to rob quite a bit of power. My only grumble about the kit is it uses lots of 2.5mm socket screws and 2.6mm socket screws, rather than just sticking to one size. The trouble is a 2.5mm allen key fits the 2.6mm socket and tightens it most the way, until it starts to torque up then the allen key slips and strips out the head of the screw such that the proper 2.6mm allen key won't shift it - and a 2.5mm allen key looks just like a 2.6mm one so you don't know you've done it till it strips it.
But other than that it's pretty much perfect. I put the supplied main rotor blades on my blade balancer, and they balanced perfectly out of the box. I've never had that happen before. I can't wait to fly it, but at the same time I'm terrified of crashing something so beautiful! (I think I'll do the test flights in a wiiiiiide open space, I won't make the mistake I did with the HDX-300, doing the maiden flight in a constrained space!) The other thing about this heli, although people say it's a park flyer, it certainly looks big enough and feels heavy enough that it could cause much pain and suffering, so it ought to be preflighted just like a full-scale heli before flight.
Interestingly, I asked the guy who owns the model shop how he's doing in these credit-crunched times, and he says he's already sold more this December than he did the whole of last December, so it seems like at least the model-buying public are saying sod-the-credit-crunch.
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