Blackhawk Down!
Update: Managed to get replacement gears for this today in The Model Shop on Capel St, Dublin. The new gears seem to be much stronger, however they came with a rotor shaft already attached to one of the gears and so I replaced the rotor shaft too, this was a little bit shorter than the original and required a bit of tweaking to fit, along with a bit of epoxy putty to hold one of the rotors onto the shaft. Tested it earlier and seems to work, but I think I jumped the gun as the epoxy hadn’t quite dried and came unstuck when I crashed (still haven’t had a chance to practice my flying skills), I’ve re-fixed it and it should be completely dry by morning.
Ok, so this isn’t quite a hack, or directly airsoft related, but trust me, It’s all part of a larger plan.
I was browsing rsov last week, and ordered a few bits and pieces for myself and some friends,while I was there, I noticed the new “Radio Control Toys” section, now as a child, I was a big fan of radio control toys, my favourite has to be the Tyco Fast Traxx, absolutely loved that thing, unfortunately it broke several years ago and I never got around to fixing it, I must dig it out some day and see. So I had a look and there’s some RC helicopters… specifically an Apache-style one that caught my eye, so I figured, ah sure why not, throw it in, for £12.99 it’ll be a laugh.
Fast Traxx (mine was Yellow 
)
The order arrived today, and I quickly took to setting it up and having some fun, the battery that comes with it is a 7.4v Lithium polymer affair, which I was quite surprised at as I expected to have to raid the house for batteries when it arrived. The battery also comes with a charger (2-pin) which shows a red light while charging and a nice convenient green light when it’s done, a nice little touch considering most chargers that come with clone AEGs dont even have a way to tell you when the battery is charged, so this ensures you dont overcharge the battery and damage it.
Also in the package is the remote unit, for this I did have to scavenge for batteries, it takes 8 (yes, that’s right 8 ) AA/LR6 size batteries, thankfully there’s a rather large box of them lying around which I was able to take from. The controller itself is large enough considering it only has two control sticks and an on/off button, but sits comfortably enough in your hands all the same. The antenna for the control is a telescopic type which is packaged seperate in the box and screws into the top of the controller.
There’s a set of spare rotors in the package too, which I thought was a nice touch, the rotors themselves seem to be decent quality and not likely to break all that easily, but helicopters do tend to crash alot more in the hands of newbies.
There’s a manual in the box, which is about 20 pages or so, half the pages are in Chinese and the other half in English, with a reasonably good translation of the instructions, not too much engrish here. The instructions are reasonable, going through the steps of installing batteries and the usual malarkey, you’ll also find a full exploded diagram of how it all goes together and a separate sheet with a list of available parts.
A.C.M. radio controlled ‘Apachi’ style helicopter (6780 - camo)
Onto the main event, the helicopter itself is about 10 or 12 inches long, it has two rotors on the top and a stabilizing weight bar. The entire thing is made out of a reasonably soft plastic which you can flex easily with your hand, this helps during what will likely be many crash landings it will experience. Out of the box, the rotors which are installed onto the helicopter are not secured, you must align them so that they are straight and tighten a screw in each one, again, another nicety here is the inclusion of a mini screwdriver to do this job with. This doesnt really take long, at first I was trying to be insanely accurate about the rotors, but I later discovered that once they are reasonably straight, you should be fine. If you crash into anything while flying, the rotors will move and you’ll need to straighten them out again before flying.
By the time I finished finding that big ol’ box of batteries and straightening the rotors out,I figured the battery probably had a semi-decent charge in it. I placed it on the floor of my living room, and brought the throttle up to a nice idle speed, there’s a fair bit of noise off the motors and the amount of air movement it generates is actually quite impressive. There are two small motors inside which each drive one of the two rotors. So I ramped up the speed a bit more and could see it wanting to move, at this stage it’s starting to move a little bit on the ground, so I gave it a bit more throttle and up she went, then down, then up again, then down again, and finally a not-so-graceful landing back onto the floor. Once the heli is up, it’s fairly tricky to get it to hover, so far I’ve crash-landed it about a dozen times or so, this will take some time to get used to I’d imagine. One thing I’ve noticed is that it tends to fly backwards a bit, and the controls only allow for left/right rotation, so not sure how to effectively get it to move around the way I want it yet. I spent a bit of time playing with it and even tried it outdoors. In today’s reasonably mild and not very windy weather, it held up fine, aside from a minor run-in with my garden fence in which the (albeit non-working) tail rotor broke off, a quick dab of super glue and this was remedied however.
At the moment I’ve yet to master the controls, but I’m sure with a few hours practice I could probably get it to hover nicely and have some form of control over it. Unfortunately, I didn’t get those few hours off practice as I think a couple of my crash landings may have misaligned some gears, the two motors mentioned earlier are connected to the rotor shafts by two gears, one of these gears, which is attached to the bottom of the two rotors, no longer has any teeth, it seems that at some pointed the gears became misaligned and stripped all the teeth off.
I’ve taken the working gear out of the heli and hope to pick up a replacement part tomorrow in Maplin, Peats or a Model shop. Hopefully replacement parts shouldn’t cost me more than about €5, if they do, I probably wont bother replacing them since it didn’t really cost me that much in the first place. Not sure what happened with the gears but I would still say these are definitely worth picking up, however try not to crash them too much.
ps. I’ll post a few pictures up later on this evening, for now, I’m back to studying for my finals.