I _just_ finished the last of the episode and my only complaint is how much you guys dis the Blade 130X.
I've got two of them and they both fly great. I think the 130X has gotten a bum rap mainly because it has vibration issues that are not immediately easy to diagnose and fix. However, with some care, you can get this little bird up and flying great for many, many flights.
The first thing that you guys all noted was that spending tons of money on upgrade parts is a total waste of time. Most of the parts in my tail assemblies are all stock. Swapping out the tail parts for Xtreme, Microheli, Lynx, etc... won't help if the parts you're swapping out aren't the ones that are causing the problems! In fact, with all that heavy metal, you're just as likely to introduce NEW problems with things being out of balance!
So, going down to the root of the vibration issues, the biggest issue that I found seemed to be the fact that the torque tube will vibrate inside the tail boom. This causes resonance with other parts at various headspeeds and can cause all sorts of crazy problems. What I found to be successful is to shore up a few key areas on the tail to help prevent other components from vibrating. To that end, all I did was
1) Add a second Tail Pushrod Support/Guide Set (BLH3721) to the tail to help provide additional support to the pushrod. At low headspeed while spooling up, I'd see the servo pushrod vibrate horribly. Adding a second BLH3721 to take up some of the slack helped to squash that.
(
http://www.bladehelis.com/Products/Default.aspx?ProdID=BLH3721)
2) Longer tail boom supports. Lynx sells some for the extended tail boom, Microheli sells some (I think), and some guys even take 300X tail boom rods and cut them down to a shorter size. In any case, I found that ANYTHING longer than the stock tail boom supports really helped kill vibes in the tail.
And that's all I did to the tail!
For the other parts of the heli, I did the following:
1) Metal A & B gears (Blade parts). Then for the tail, I'd either have a metal C and plastic D or vice versa. Yes, when I crash, I'm going to strip the plastic one, but they're not hard to swap out and I'd rather strip that gear than damage a tooth in a full metal gear setup.
2) Microheli swashplate with o-rings on all ball links. I picked up o-rings from (
http://www.oringsandmore.com/) and that helped take any slop out of the cyclic.
For maintenance, here are the things that I would swap out on a semi-regular basis:
1) I found that the 'D' shape hole in the C gear would sometimes start to round out after use so you'd have to replace the C gear.
2) I also found that the ends of the metal torque tube would also start to round out after time. You'd notice this with intermittent tail wag because the C gear would start to slip intermittently so you'd just swap out the torque tube.
3) Finally, once a year, I'd have to disassemble the linear servos and run a q-tip with rubbing alcohol over the resistor strip on the PCB to clean it. Then I'd have solid servo performances again!
Both my 130Xs are still great backyard or local park fliers. I know that they've been resigned to the dustbin of history, but darnit, I'm going to keep trying to tell folks that these helis can fly great if you know what to do!
