Walkera 36 parts, tweaks and upgrades - which ones are best?

[heli42]

Hi guy and gals, and especially Walkera 36 owners...

There is a lot of info on the net about the Walkera 36, but it's all dispersed across thousands of sites and forum posts... and when it comes to parts and tweaks, there is rarely a direct comparison between the different options, so I decided that I would try to make my own questions (after having done a lot of online reading and still having more questions than answers...) into a larger post/thread in the hopes that it may prove useful to anyone who is (still) playing around with the good old Walkera 36. I know you guys are out there! :-)

I bought a Walkera 36 about 10 years ago. It sat in the box for about 9 years... because I was told that without some (simulator) practice, I would crash it on the first attempt. It wasn't true - I crashed it on the 3rd flight after taking it out of the box 9 years later :-).

Later, when I got bitten by the bug for the second time, I bought an AR Drone, had fun with it, and decided it was time to go back to real helis, so I bought a Walkera V120D01 and learned to fly it successfully.

It was then when I decided to return to my Walkera 36 which was still in shambles from the crash... and learn how to BUILD and tweak a collective pitch heli.

And that's what brought me here... looking for some expert advice. I decided to (completely re-)build a Walkera 36 from the parts I got over the last few months, which is 4 almost complete Walkera 36's in various states. From the parts I have, I could easily put together 2 or maybe even 3 complete helis.

You may ask why an old Walkera 36, well, here's why: I want to learn how to build, maintain, upgrade, tweak etc. and I'm a beginner in both flying and building. I already crashed 5 different types of helis/multicopters while flying them with varying success, and having little experience in both flying AND building, I'm expecting to crash some more in the process... so I prefer to hone my skills first on a bird that's collective pitch but still pretty simple, has been around for ages, with info and spare parts still widely available. Just as important, complete used Walkera 36s for spares can be bought for as much as most individual parts cost for a modern heli... so I'm in it for the learning experience and the Walkera 36 seems to me like a good overall platform for learning and experimenting with all kinds of options.

Sorry for the long introduction - I wanted to prevent replies like "why don't you get a ... instead". I have a closet full of Walkera 36s and parts, I can take one apart and put it back together in minutes with coffee in one hand :-) so I'd like to play with this one for a while, and once I am really good at it (both building, tweaking and flying), I want to transition to a larger, state of the art bird, armed with all the experience I got playing with the Walkera.

So... I'v got boxes and boxes of parts, and very little experience to know which parts are better than others... I'm looking for advice on what to use from my stash of parts to build the best Walkera 36 possible.

Brushless motors

I have 3 different brushless motors. One is the Walkera that came with a 36:



And two others I can't identify as they have nothing printed on them. This one worked really nicely in a 36 (until I crashed it, that is) - does anyone know what brand and model is it?



And I got this as a spare (not installed) and don't know what it is:



ESCs

I have 3 different ESCs, and trying to find out some info from those who know them which one is most recommended:

A Tower Pro ESC:



An Elf Hobby ESC:



And one with absolutely nothing printed on it - it came with the spare red and black brushless motor:



Any recommendations on which one is best?

TX/RX

I have a Walkera WK-601 and a WK-701 transmitter, 35Mhz and 72Mhz, respectively.

The 601 comes with this RX, which seems to work OK:



The 701 comes with this one, which also seems to work OK:



Is there any advantage to the 701 over the 601?

This one came with one of the "for parts" helis I got, not installed, and I wonder if it would work well for the Walkera 36 - any pros/cons? Is it a good idea to use this (or something like this) to upgrade the Walkera 36 to 2.4Ghz? If so, what would be a good choice of TX to use it with?



Gyros

There are several incarnations of the gyro Walkera shipped the 36 with. One of the older ones I have is the WK-G006:



And one of the newer ones is the WK-G010 (apparently the G011 was the last one in this series that all look and seem to work pretty much the same):



Is the 010 a big improvement over the 006? If it is, how so? Has anyone had the chance using different ones in the series to be able to compare them / tell if there's any difference?

One of my used 36's came with this one (GAZ-126) - I assume it must be better than the Walkera gyros if someone took the trouble to upgrade his Walkera 36 to this gyro... - is it really better?



Servos

I have a whole bag of about 40 different servos... all in different states between brand new and pretty worn out. So I'm looking for advice on which ones are good, and which ones are bad:

Of course there are the original Walkera NS-05 servos most Walkera 36s came with. Some people say they are garbage, but I never really had any problems with them (maybe I haven't flown enough yet...).

So the question is, are these any better as replacements?

EMAX ES08:



GWS:



HITEC HS-65MG (it says "metal gear" on it, and I have to say it does sound a lot better than the plastic ones - it feels it would be more "robust" - but is it really so?):



Tower Pro MG90S:



Are any of those better than the rest? Is there any advantage/disadvantage to mixing servos from different manufacturers on the same heli?

So that's about it - sorry for the number of newbie-ish questions, I have little experience and really just getting into the tweaking part, but hopefully this thread will be valuable for anyone with similar questions to mine.