For the longest time, I was flying on 315mm wooden blades. I hadn't even noticed that they were shorter until one day it seemed odd. They must have been floating around my spare parts box.

In any case, these woodies had lasted a pretty long time, through thick and thin. A small blade strike during flight #31 snapped them finally. Replaced them with 325mm and put in a new feathering shaft. Took the opportunity to 90° / zero out all the controls.

The remainder of flight 31...

Took my BCP out last night to try out its settings with my new DX6i and apparently things weren't dialed in perfectly. The bird hit the ground and stripped two of the three cyclic servos. Sigh.... A rare crash for my usually super-stable Belt CP.

Took the occasion to replace the E-sky servos with SG90s / HXT900s.

Before the crash and unrelated to it (but I'll include it in the crash count), my main gear worked itself free of the one-way bearing and was free-wheeling. I...

Two events led me to switch to 2.4 ghz. First, the darn glitching on my HK-450 led me first to get a digital PCM 72mhz receiver, but then I accidentally cooked it on the E-smart, which really irritated me.

So in a fit of anger, I ordered a DX6i and some AR6100s. Just installed the first AR6100 into my Belt CP and flew it around today.

Why is it that doing absolutely nothing but switching out a radio can lead to everything being off key? I had to readjust the head and the...

There was a gap in the rain to get in two nice 6 minute flights on the HK-450. No incidents whatsoever, except for a slight spazzing of the tail / gyro. Adjusting the servo position seemed to help a little but I think it's fundamentally a cheap gyro. The aileron glitch disappeared which means that it really was an analog receiver problem. Bah.


I put in the new CNC tail and it's great.
...

The glitch that I was previously having got worse. On spoolup, I encountered a full blown left aileron glitch while at full power and the blades cratered into the ground. The CF blades snapped dramatically. I'm almost out of 325mm blades! I just have the HobbyKing OEM blades, which stink!

Rerouting the ESC cable doesn't seem to have helped the glitching issue. I think it's because I'm using an analog PPM receiver and the motor/ESC I am using are high-power, high-EMF. I decided to...