borocouncilman
09-13-2007, 09:01 PM
Well, I moved the servos, receiver, gyro, and battery from my Blade CP to an Esky Honey Bee King 2. At $70, it's priced like a big replacement part. For Blade CP owners, I thought that I'd share my experience of making the switch.
Assembly was straightforward. The King 2 comes in large pre-assembled pieces with screws already threaded in. Putting things together was a matter of taking out the screws, matching up the pieces, and screwing things back in. Whereas the Blade has almost no screws, the King 2's screwed together assembly makes for a pretty solid feeling helicopter. All of the plastic seems to be molded well and fits tightly. It's helpful to be mechanically inclined as the documentation is useless for this process.
The included symmetrical blades have "T-Rex Jr" appearance with tapered tips. As a bonus, the wooden blades balanced like a champ right out of the box. It's too bad that poorly affixed paper tracking tape covered 3/4 around the blades with loose ends sticking up. When I pulled off the tape, it simply delaminated. This required some time to work the tape remnants off and balance again. I ended up covering what I couldn't get off with align tracking tape.
Servo installation follows the same basic 120 degree layout as the Blade CP. The E-Flite servos fit perfectly. Again everything is held in by screws. No double-sided tape or zip ties here. Curiously, the swash plate also has ball joints at the 90 degree marks. It looks like a generic piece. They only seem to serve as an obstacle for adjustment as they can't be used on the King 2.
The rotor head is interesting in terms of complexity, but the ball links are complete garbage. Fortunately, you don't have to deal with them much -- there's only one adjustable linkage per side, but I found them to be genuinely frustrating. I even bent a linkage trying to get it off a ball. While I was able to straighten it out, balls and links on the helicopter do not scream "quality".
For the tail rotor servo, I went with a HiTec 56HB feather. At 0.1s, it was the fastest sub micro that my local hobby shop had in stock. Aligning the tail rotor servo is always something of a black art ensuring that you've got necessary travel for tail rotor pitch and not a lot of stiction.
Positioning the rest of the electronics was an unremarkable exercise, but you quickly notice that the King 2 has a real tail heavy bias. I tried to keep everything forward, even in mounting my AR6100 under the main gear and against the LiPo tray. I got it as close to balanced as possible, but it still favored the tail.
For setup and programming, I started with my DX7 Blade CP program and worked from there. The CCPM servo directions are all the same for cyclic. You will have to reverse the pitch programming from a Blade CP along with the rudder and G90 gyro. As per my earlier comments, the mechanical side of the pitch adjustments will be a little frustrating, but once that setup is taken care of, you'll find the head runs +7/-7 degrees per spec and starting with level servo arms. I went for -2 and +7 for normal flight mode.
After dealing with the little annoyances, I had extremely low expectations for the first flight. It was getting dark and I wanted to get this thing up in the air. I hooked up the motor and battery in the driveway. Airborne or bust at this point.
As I advanced the collective, the King 2 turned about 90 degrees as things got up to speed. The plastic part of the skids don't have a lot of friction and slide during spin up. As the head speed built up, the negative pitch kept it planted. I got it a couple of foot off the ground and was pleasantly surprised.
This thing actually flies well. While it's no T-Rex, I was able to trim it pretty quickly to a hands off hover. With some some gain adjustments for the heading hold gyro, the tail seemed to work predictably if not perfectly dialed in. Not bad at all for $70.
As I flew it around the front yard, I found it to be pretty enjoyable. Unlike the Blade CP tail motor setup, the tail is nice and responsive in BOTH directions. For the shakedown flight, I largely focused on hovering, but managed to give forward flight a little go as well. From both appearance and manners, this is a micro helicopter that actually feels like a bigger machine.
When you're working the collective, you will be left with the accurate the impression that it's not a high performance helicopter. The brush motor delivers sufficient power, but don't plan on doing tick tocks. Punch the collective and it will lazily gain altitude. While this helicopter is significantly heavier than the Blade CP, it gets by with a similarly sized hotted up 370 motor that gets incredibly hot keeping things airbone. Cyclic is nice and responsive, but it will write checks that the power system can't cash. Be sure to have some altitude if you're fooling around.
Of course that can be fixed with a brushless motor upgrade. Given the heat that this motor puts out, I suspect that I may be down that road sooner rather than later. You can take the King 2 brushless for about $50-60 and presumably turn it into a screamer.
Is the Honey Bee King 2 worth taking the plunge? It's a significantly more sophisticated bird and a "real" helicopter with none of the traditional micro helicopter compromises (ie. fixed pitch tail rotors, no auto-rotation gear). I'm sold on it after the first flight.
If you've already got a computer radio and gyro, you can move them into a Honey Bee King 2 bare bones ARF kit for $70. Add in a tail servo and the cheap ESky ESC, you're in the air with a completely new helicopter for less than $100. Cheap, considering that you can get halfway there in a nasty crash with the Blade CP. If you're still flying a Blade CP with the stock radio and no gyro, you're better off spending the $160 on the RTF version.
ARF or RTF, its price point is tough to beat.
Assembly was straightforward. The King 2 comes in large pre-assembled pieces with screws already threaded in. Putting things together was a matter of taking out the screws, matching up the pieces, and screwing things back in. Whereas the Blade has almost no screws, the King 2's screwed together assembly makes for a pretty solid feeling helicopter. All of the plastic seems to be molded well and fits tightly. It's helpful to be mechanically inclined as the documentation is useless for this process.
The included symmetrical blades have "T-Rex Jr" appearance with tapered tips. As a bonus, the wooden blades balanced like a champ right out of the box. It's too bad that poorly affixed paper tracking tape covered 3/4 around the blades with loose ends sticking up. When I pulled off the tape, it simply delaminated. This required some time to work the tape remnants off and balance again. I ended up covering what I couldn't get off with align tracking tape.
Servo installation follows the same basic 120 degree layout as the Blade CP. The E-Flite servos fit perfectly. Again everything is held in by screws. No double-sided tape or zip ties here. Curiously, the swash plate also has ball joints at the 90 degree marks. It looks like a generic piece. They only seem to serve as an obstacle for adjustment as they can't be used on the King 2.
The rotor head is interesting in terms of complexity, but the ball links are complete garbage. Fortunately, you don't have to deal with them much -- there's only one adjustable linkage per side, but I found them to be genuinely frustrating. I even bent a linkage trying to get it off a ball. While I was able to straighten it out, balls and links on the helicopter do not scream "quality".
For the tail rotor servo, I went with a HiTec 56HB feather. At 0.1s, it was the fastest sub micro that my local hobby shop had in stock. Aligning the tail rotor servo is always something of a black art ensuring that you've got necessary travel for tail rotor pitch and not a lot of stiction.
Positioning the rest of the electronics was an unremarkable exercise, but you quickly notice that the King 2 has a real tail heavy bias. I tried to keep everything forward, even in mounting my AR6100 under the main gear and against the LiPo tray. I got it as close to balanced as possible, but it still favored the tail.
For setup and programming, I started with my DX7 Blade CP program and worked from there. The CCPM servo directions are all the same for cyclic. You will have to reverse the pitch programming from a Blade CP along with the rudder and G90 gyro. As per my earlier comments, the mechanical side of the pitch adjustments will be a little frustrating, but once that setup is taken care of, you'll find the head runs +7/-7 degrees per spec and starting with level servo arms. I went for -2 and +7 for normal flight mode.
After dealing with the little annoyances, I had extremely low expectations for the first flight. It was getting dark and I wanted to get this thing up in the air. I hooked up the motor and battery in the driveway. Airborne or bust at this point.
As I advanced the collective, the King 2 turned about 90 degrees as things got up to speed. The plastic part of the skids don't have a lot of friction and slide during spin up. As the head speed built up, the negative pitch kept it planted. I got it a couple of foot off the ground and was pleasantly surprised.
This thing actually flies well. While it's no T-Rex, I was able to trim it pretty quickly to a hands off hover. With some some gain adjustments for the heading hold gyro, the tail seemed to work predictably if not perfectly dialed in. Not bad at all for $70.
As I flew it around the front yard, I found it to be pretty enjoyable. Unlike the Blade CP tail motor setup, the tail is nice and responsive in BOTH directions. For the shakedown flight, I largely focused on hovering, but managed to give forward flight a little go as well. From both appearance and manners, this is a micro helicopter that actually feels like a bigger machine.
When you're working the collective, you will be left with the accurate the impression that it's not a high performance helicopter. The brush motor delivers sufficient power, but don't plan on doing tick tocks. Punch the collective and it will lazily gain altitude. While this helicopter is significantly heavier than the Blade CP, it gets by with a similarly sized hotted up 370 motor that gets incredibly hot keeping things airbone. Cyclic is nice and responsive, but it will write checks that the power system can't cash. Be sure to have some altitude if you're fooling around.
Of course that can be fixed with a brushless motor upgrade. Given the heat that this motor puts out, I suspect that I may be down that road sooner rather than later. You can take the King 2 brushless for about $50-60 and presumably turn it into a screamer.
Is the Honey Bee King 2 worth taking the plunge? It's a significantly more sophisticated bird and a "real" helicopter with none of the traditional micro helicopter compromises (ie. fixed pitch tail rotors, no auto-rotation gear). I'm sold on it after the first flight.
If you've already got a computer radio and gyro, you can move them into a Honey Bee King 2 bare bones ARF kit for $70. Add in a tail servo and the cheap ESky ESC, you're in the air with a completely new helicopter for less than $100. Cheap, considering that you can get halfway there in a nasty crash with the Blade CP. If you're still flying a Blade CP with the stock radio and no gyro, you're better off spending the $160 on the RTF version.
ARF or RTF, its price point is tough to beat.