Ute R/C Association Come on, let's fly!

I wrote up a review over at Helifreak on the new E-Flite Blade SR helicopter I picked up today. It's a full collective-pitch helicopter, but much like a Blade 400 scaled down to just slightly larger than a Blade CP, with the new lower-maintenance-less-headache coreless direct-drive tail. I plan to bring it for show-and-tell at the next club meeting, but for those of us with email & forum access, you get a preview!

Web site for the Blade SR: http://www.e-fliterc.com/Products/Default.aspx?ProdID=EFLH1500

My review on Helifreak (below): http://helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=195885

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Thoughts & Review of my new Blade SR
So I picked up my new Blade SR today. Here are some initial thoughts from the first two gentle flights.

ABOUT ME

I've been flying since shortly after I turned 30 in 2004, mostly electric with some nitro thrown in here and there. Picked up my first helicopter (a Blade CX) in early 2006, then stepped up to a T-Rex 450XL HDE (still a daily driver!) in late summer of that year. Eventually got a Raptor 30, Raptor 50, and have an Audacity Pantera 50 waiting in the barn for me to finish.

Anyway, my T-Rex has quite a few metal parts that have just worn out from several years of flying. While looking at various parts sources for the head rebuild, I realized I could probably pick up a decent, whole, cloned frame & head for under $100 from various sources online (and while I'm at it, move from mCCPM to eCCPM), and that freed up a lot of my repair budget to look for a second micro heli. Checked out a bunch, but the Blade SR stood out for the brushless motor, compatibility with my DX7 (even though it comes with a throw-away transmitter), good solution to the burned-out-tail-motor issue of early CPs (coreless, direct-drive motor with sizeable heat sink), and good value for the money in a Horizon Hobby product, particularly compared to the Blade CP line.

BUYING IT

Three of my local hobby shops took delivery of several SRs on Friday, and still had them in-stock today (Monday). I called around, and my localer-than-everybody-else hobby shop offered to knock $10 off the price, so they won. The manager, Tom, chatted with me for about an hour about his inventory, and I offered my experience with various airplanes and helis that he carried, along with some suggestions of brands that I liked and would buy from his store if he carried them. I picked up several of the most critical parts to get my T-Rex 450XL HDE flying again prior to the major rebuild, and walked out of the hobby shop around $250 poorer.

MODDING IT

Other than replacing the ESC and included battery ends with Dean's Ultra Plugs, I chose to leave the bird bone-stock. I charged up the included battery, along with a couple of LiPos from my own inventory that should be decent alternative batteries, then headed out to my back acre and fired it up using the stock transmitter.

FIRST FLIGHT

For whatever reason, the included transmitter wasn't bound to the receiver. I thought this was odd, since every one of these birds was supposedly "test flown" at the factory. Regardless, the binding procedure is very straightforward and well-documented in the surprisingly-thick manual. I re-bound the receiver to the transmitter, unplugged it, removed the bind plug, and plugged the ESC (2-in-1) back in. Success! I heard the brief dulcet tones of an electric motor arming for flight, stepped back, and throttled up slowly.

Once it lifted off, I had to hold an immense amount of right rudder to keep the tail straight. Realizing something was amiss, I hit throttle hold, brought it down (it autos from 2 feet just fine, but to my surprise throttle hold kills the tail rotor instantly, too!), and checked over the heli. Suspecting I'd bumped it while the gyro was arming, I disconnected power, reconnected, and made very sure to avoid touching the heli further until the electric motor and gyro were both armed. This procedure is thoroughly documented in the manual, too.

This time, the liftoff was perfect. Having never flown a heli with a motorized tail before (belt-drive or co-axial for me!), I was initially very surprised by the noise the tail makes. Once the heli settles in, that's really most of what you hear: that little tail motor speeding up or slowing down as you fly.

I did a couple of minutes of tail-in, side-in, other side-in, nose-in to get accustomed to the bird. The tail has some wag to it. I knew what to do -- typically, lower the gain -- but decided to look through the instructions to find out if it covers that eventuality for beginning pilots, and it does! Adjusted the gain down a bit at the end of the pack, and tossed one of my old 1000mAh 3S packs in.

The change was surprising. The head speed was clearly higher with a 20C-30C pack than with the 15C pack provided by E-Flite with the Blade SR, and despite turning down the gain a bit after the first flight, the tail was still wagging quite a bit. I ran it through the hovering paces and decided to try some forward flight. Ran it up over the pasture next door, did some quick inside & outside eights, a couple of stall turns, and then tried a loop.

OK, this bird is set up with WAY less negative pitch than my T-Rex 450! It looped OK, but apparently I'm not going to climb out very quickly while inverted. Finished that flight, and then sat down to lose the shakes.

THOUGHTS

* The tail wag sorts itself out in forward flight, but I'm going to adjust the gain down a bit. Given the various C-ratings of the pack I fly, I foresee having to tweak this periodically, and without remote gain it might become irritating.
* There's an un-plugged-in servo plug hanging out in the bundle of wires underneath the gyro. Could this be the gain channel? Is it possible to use remote gain on the dial on the Tx if you simply... plug it in? Going to try this out after I feel like I have it dialed in with the stock config.
* Tracking was perfect.
* There's some substantial tail vibration at certain head speeds. I have a wonderful little powder scale that alerts me to slight variations in my blade weight, so I'm going to check the main blade weights and CGs to see if they are spot-on. The vibration isn't horrible -- and is only present on higher-C-rated packs -- so my guess is it's just something they didn't see in the test flight.
* Other than the tail wag, this helicopter is very confidence-inspiring. It handled a 5-7MPH wind out of the northwest just fine with only minor balloon and drop behavior. This wind made trimming it a bit problematic, but I only needed a few clicks of elevator (to counter, I suppose, a poorly-measured CG) each time.
* There is some drift to the tail as the battery drains. I'm not sure why, but it'll start out needing a touch of left trim, and end up needing a touch of right 5 minutes later. I'm not used to that in any of my helis; I expect them to hold their tail straight whenever commanded to do so. I could use some advice figuring out how to stop this tendency. Maybe it's the temperature and exposure to sunlight, too, as it's still quite cool in Utah this time of year and I brought the heli in from indoors to outdoors to fly it.
* I'm used to having a governed head speed. The default throttle curves in both Idle 1 and Normal mode leave something to be desired as they result in noticeably diminished responsiveness and head speed around mid-stick. I guess that's largely the fault of the transmitter because it's set up to be "mild", but it really feels like it has quite a very flat throttle curve around the middle, with most of the movement in the last 10% of the stick movement.
* The bird has a reasonable presence in the sky, but nowhere near as much as a 450-class heli. It gets really tiny, really quick if you push the nose down and the pitch forward!

I'm a sport pilot, and with several years of RC heli experience under my belt, I'm probably not the target market for this bird. But as a decent little heli that is probably capable of much more than it is set up to be from the factory, can handle wind with aplomb, and is docile enough with low enough head speed to avoid frightening people, I think it will travel with me to the flying field and on family trips on a regular basis.

Overall, after very minor tweaks that are covered in the user's manual, I think this is a very competent helicopter. E-Flite merged some of the best features of their Blade CP and Blade 400 helicopters to create the SR, and so far as a step-up second heli for those accustomed to a small coaxial or fixed-pitch single-rotor heli, I think it fits the bill.

And it's a relaxing, predictable bird with reasonable aerobatic capability for the rest of us.
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