broken blades?

[mak24seven]

ok chaps, i'm new to this so be gentle, and my terminology and spelling is rubish so bear with me, i've got a little counter rotating heli (venom) and for me as a bigginer its let me fly, hover, turn and get to grips with the hole idea of rc copters in less than a week without loosing control once, bless the litttle toy ( i will be buying a propper heli soon so be prepared for some drastic desaster posts :-) my problem with the venom is that when turning hard left the stabilizer pole hits the bottom set of blades and snaps them clean off in mid air! nice. any ideas or questions regarding the set up would be welcome but appart from that the little thing flys like a dream. cheers. steve.

[chaos]

There isn't much of anything you can do, in my opinion, other than not do radical maneuvers with it. I don't believe there is any adjustment in the transmitter to limit the servo movement, but you might be able to move the link from the swashplate to the servo arm to a hole in the servo arm that's closer to the center. I don't know if that's possible or not. If that was done, it should be done to both servos. This would make it less sensitive and possibly prevent enough input to tilt it enough to hit the stabilizer bar (also known as the flybar).

The thing that gives that type heli its stability is that the flybar tries to remain level, like a gyroscope, and it in turn tries to keep the upper blade level. The bottom blade is the steering blade. To get the bottom blade in the path of the flybar requires a fairly radical maneuver. This heli isn't intended for acrobatics so the best solution would be to just not use so much stick that you tilt it enough to cause the problem.

This type of heli is excellent for getting oriented. Learning to hover with the heli pointed at you is a big step forward. Being able to land with the nose pointed in any direction, with no horizontal movement, is a good thing to work on. But this isn't a acrobatic heli and I'd suggest avoiding any radical maneuvers.

When you get a "proper heli" it won't be as stable and so you'll have to get used to that. So again, I suggest not doing anything radical till you get a grip on it. And it would be a good idea to get some training gear for it and stay low, like a foot off the ground, in case it gets out of control. Work on a good solid hover, a clean liftoff, and a soft landing with no horizontal movement.

The counter rotating blade heli really doesn't want to fly upside down, but a "proper heli" wont object to rolling over. It will be much easier to get the thing into very steep rotor disk angles, and that's a thing you should avoid at first. The thing that's actually doing the flying is the rotor disk, and the rest of the heli is just a support package for the rotor disk. Basically, what you're flying is the rotor disk, so it will be important to keep focused on what it's doing. It will be easily possible to get it into steep angles, and when that happens it will be quickly going somewhere. In the beginning you want to keep the rotor disk angle fairly shallow so that it moves around fairly slowly, giving you time to react.

You're headed for a lot of fun.

[inertia]

I am starting out with a Twister Bell and was finding the exact same problem; I'd just be building up some confidence with maneuvers then - BLAM - plastic shower.

It took a while to figure out exactly how hard I could go without hitting the blades, but if you start with some easy turns and build up into faster ones you will reach a point where you can hear the wind of the blades rushing past each other.

This is how hard you can go - any faster and that sound of wind turns to the sound of plastic on plastic.