RCA / Roban Super Scale 700 Bell 407

[Keyrigger]

I am thinking that copterdoctor has the right line of thinking when it comes to scale helicopters and weight. My TOW Defender is my heaviest helicopter and it flies solid as a rock and certainly has the mass for the rotor disk it has to pull off a respectable auto as long as I have my nerves about me. Recently I have had two autos that have resulted in damage but not a loss. There were many that witnessed both of these recent events and I can tell you that the heavier helicopter made out like a bandit. The auto with my lightest scale helicopter, the CH-139, was witnessed by quite a few people and the damage to it was worse with it than the TOW Defender. There was no hidden damage to the TOW Defender but there was a lot of hidden damage to the CH-139, go figure, and yet both were back up in the air on the same day of their autos. It's hard to describe it but it's something like the visual feedback that you get from the heavier helicopter in the air to your control movements, gives you a better feeling for how the landing is going to turn out. I had one of those moments in Dalton where I put the TD up in the air with an uncharged pack and I fought it dropping out of the air all the way to a successful landing. The only way to describe it was that I could anticipate what it was going to do at any given moment in the mayhem that it was going on in the air. The heavier helicopters just feel more solid when you fly them. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, lol. Take care.

Don

[Andy01]

Originally Posted by flyawayed

no I have a second V1 MC 407 I'm thinking of building a set of goblin mechanics and making it a dog house setup

Just check on the width of the doghouse. There are not too many fuselages around (especially 700 size) that have a wide enough doghouse to take a Goblin mechanics because they are pretty wide across the servos, and it is lopsided with one side wider than the other.

Joe has a dimensioned photo on his East Coast Vario site.

I use them in my Baumann EC-145, but it is probably a bigger heli (4x 820mm blades) with a particularly wide doghouse.

Colin

[heli143]

I haven't done anything during the holiday break except start putting rivets on my MC 407.

But as for the Roban 407, I have a new set of legs coming in the mail. Mike Spinner (JestRR) built me a set of scale high skids for it. I will post pics when I get them. He does real nice work so I'm looking forward to trying them on

[heli143]

My new landing gear from Mike Spinner arrived and I installed it to see how it looks. Mike has always done really nice work and I have purchased several sets of LG from him.
to see the difference, here is the Roban kit LG;

[heli143]

and here is the Northwest Scaleworks LG;

[heli143]

I met up with my friend and mentor Emile (copterdoctor) yesterday and we went over the changes that need to be made to this fuselage.
The most obvious is changing the door hinges and door handles.
I will install Vario scale door hinges and remove the door handles which look terrible on there in my opinion and are completely non-scale.
The nose is missing the vents, the pitot tube is located in the wrong spot and those fuel vents on the left (port) side which are visible in the pics need to be removed also. After that the corrections list gets much shorter and less necessary but they are things that will be very noticeable once done.
In spite of all the corrections I will be making, things that folks who are not scale fanatics may not notice, I really like the Roban 407 and it will not be my last Roban kit for sure. I also have the Roban 429. I will update as I go along with comparison pics to really show the difference the changes will make.