Welcome to the Rotor Revolution RC podcast with Brian Birdsong, Alex Dean, Kenny Hutton, and Nick Wisdom. Welcome to the Road to Revolution. I am your host, Nick. This is episode... Dad, are you playing with RC helicopters again? Oh my gosh. He sure is. What do you think about RC Helicopters? He's gone. He left. He's gone. Aww.
I love how Nick tried to really get through it really quickly, didn't he? Oh, I knew it was coming. It's always coming. Oh, man. We got the whole crew. And we're excited. We got lots to talk about. We got... fun flies we got getting back in it we got winter builds all kinds of stuff going on but can i just kind of jump in with something first yeah yeah so sure
You know, we had a lot of fun last episode going back and forth with Doug. And I just kind of want to say that, like, you know what? I've been feeling this, like, kumbaya, I love everybody moment lately. And I just want to say that we don't care what FBL you fly. We don't care what brand you fly. We don't care what radio you fly. We don't care where you bought it. We're just here because we love our RC helicopters. And we're really glad that you do too.
Yeah, we had a lot of fun last week making fun of each other, but seriously, we're just here to celebrate the hobby. Doug actually had a message for you, Nick. Oh, I can't wait. Are you ready? Uh-huh. gross can i tell you how awful that is when you have headphones in you're all dirty now oh man oh gross
You just allowed that to work so well because he really did message me saying, give him a kiss for me. And I was like, I'm going to work it in. And it just worked out right there, Doug. Oh, God, man. I could have lived my whole life without having that moment in my ear.
thank you all right i'm excited for you guys to tell me about winter bash and gators winter bash and all that yeah what do we want to do do we want to just like do what we did other than winter bash and then do a little bit of winter bash Do you want me to just give my update real quick, and then y'all can kind of give yours together with one of our best stuff? Yeah, that's a good idea, Alex. Sure. I still haven't flown my Nitro, and I might not have it anymore. How do you use their mic?
Well, so a buddy of mine bought it and said after he bought it, what if I fix it, get it flying, and then sell it back to you? And I said, strong maybe. So I'm being totally lazy in the hobby, but I am, dude, I am feeling so motivated again and I'm really excited. So I got my new Spectre Ultimate built.
you know when i saw the pictures of this thing with the purple and black and yellow or not yellow white canopy i was like super excited about it like i loved it but the purple is really dark and in the air it kind of looks like a blob like it's harder to see than i expected it to and i'm good with white and dark colored stuff but i do wish the pink or purple was a little bit lighter on the top have you guys seen them in person yet
I have, yeah, but it was a really bright, sunny day, so it showed up really well. Oh, okay, so I guess disclaimer there, I've only flown it on like super overcast, windy, kind of almost raining so far. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. That's tough for any color.
okay that's true that's true but man it it it's really nice and in the past i've said negative things if you've talked to me personally about xl power like the tail fin always shaking because there's a vibration or something like that so like i was being very particular about when this thing took off is it going to be shaking and it is so freaking smooth like on the bench i spun it up with no blades
And I do that with every machine, but literally touching it with no blades on it, I was like, wow, this feels silky. It's really amazing. Nice. Great machine. I did have a few little build issues that were kind of weird. spindle the main shaft feathering shaft whatever you want to call it was the perfect size to fit through the bearings the radial bearings not the thrust bearings and would not actually go through and i forced them onto the thing
And then when I tried to tighten the head down, I actually couldn't tighten it enough to pull the shaft through those bearings. It was so tight. Wow. So I had to press the shaft out of there, and then I ended up having to chuck it up in a drill bit and polish it with some sandpaper. So you polished your shaft. Yeah, he did. It's weird though, because I didn't enjoy doing it. With sandpaper though. Maybe that's why I didn't enjoy it. I didn't enjoy polishing my shaft.
oh gosh and it was funny because it was happening and I was kind of pissed off about it yeah but but you know I guess every machine I've built has had something I can't I'm not just harping on xl power here don't take it like that like i had i had one-way bearing problems with my sab and stuff like that and i talked about all that i thought it'd be only fair for me to be honest about this one too
so yeah and we'll dig into the ultimate a little more we're planning on doing a tron elite specter ultimate combo review episode coming up in the near future with some special guests so well i don't have a whole lot of flights on it but man my initial flight was like this is really freaking good so i'm excited to get out and fly it this weekend wife already gave me the okay to get out on saturday with the guys it's been a you know it's been a while because i've been
Like we discussed a little burnout, but I'm over my burnout, dude. Like practicing maneuvers on the sim again and taking notes on what I'm doing. Dude, I'm like, I am pumped. That's awesome. Yeah. I feel really excited about. being excited about the hobby again. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a little sad though. Why? It's like, well, you live in Texas, right? And it's warm and you can fly almost year round. So we're all going to be in winter and it's going to be cold. And you're going to be like.
i flew and it was awesome and it was great and i got like 97 flights in and we're gonna be like i am gonna do that so today we're recording on december the 18th it was 65 today nice sunny and windy so i didn't even try and it's a i'm kind of glad it was windy because i was really busy at work and i would have been like if it was really nice i'm kind of pissed off that i was really busy at work because i wanted to go fly
But tomorrow I'm planning on doing my typical lunch break, go fly thing also. Yeah, I'm back at it, dude. I've got my charger and my battery in the car. And yeah, I'm pretty pumped. Hey, Alex. Yeah. Don't forget to charge your radio. Oh, I'm glad you said that. I know you're a little rusty. I don't want something bad to happen. I'm like going to plug it in while we're recording because I'm going to totally forget.
Yeah, thank you for that. Well, that's awesome, dude. I miss Winter Bash. Wish I was there watching the content and stuff. Looks super exciting. Yeah, man. Some of the other Texas guys from the Lone Star RC podcast were there and kept calling me and making me feel like I was missing out. You're just lucky we didn't have a cardboard cutout of you.
You know, the Flat Alex thing has made it to my house. Did I tell you guys that? No. That's funny. I have it in my bed. When I'm not home, I put it on my bed. I did get a message from him saying, where's flat Alex? How could you guys not bring it? I was just like, uh, every time you go flying, you should just use that. Like just set it in place of where you should be and just go fly.
I didn't set it up my office chair. Yeah. Just claim your own flight station, put it on a stake and just put it in the ground. I like that idea. cool well that's me that's all that's all for me so nice yeah well what do we want to do guys do you want to jump into what we did that wasn't winter bash and then do winter bash oh wait wait wait i have a i have one more thing
No, that's Kenny's thing. No, I got one more thing. So I'm building my Spectre Ultimate and I'm taking my sweet time and I start getting excited. This has been, you know, the lead up to Christmas when you've got kids is super busy. Like you're like Christmas shopping. I'm still working. And for whatever reason, it's been like a super busy time of year for me. And my buddy, Rusty, who was my caller for the IRTA competition.
called me on Friday. He's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm working. And he goes, well, I'll come over and finish building your specter for you. So shout out to Rusty. Listen to me. I gave my own nitro away to someone else to fix. Rusty came over and finished my helicopter for me. You got a princesses back. Yeah, I'm back, baby. Oh, that's awesome. I love that someone's going to fix your nitro and try and get you to take it back. Because I think you're going to wait.
Yeah, I know I would like it. I was at a place where it was in my way. I didn't want to put it back together, and I wanted to build this ultimate. There was just too much going on with family stuff. And I was like, not, not going to deal with it is all. Yeah. Worked out. I saw some YS parts at Winter Bash someone had for sale and it made me think of Alex. I was like, how can I use these? Probably could. Yeah, like a whole new engine. Yeah. I didn't have my bearings about me that day.
Oh God, stop it. Did Doug get your bearing out? No, he couldn't get it out. What? Yeah. So Alan Alsabrook is the, we've had him on the podcast before. He's the young guy. He's the guy doing it for me.
or bought it i don't know if i'm ever i'm not i don't know if i'm getting it back or not or if i'm gonna buy it back or whatever but anyway he texts me after he gets it and he goes it just took two hits with this hammer and i got it out and i was like you're freaking joking dude like i had it like heated up to 500 degrees and hammering on it while it was that hot and couldn't get it out so yeah wow well hey uh he's a farmer and he was like yeah we farmers get things done
well cool yep okay no more one things no more one more thing or something same question what do you want to do you guys want to cover what we did other than winter bash and then do winter bash Or just kind of go through our own? I think we can go through our own experience. All right. You spoke, so you go first. Yeah. So that kind of starts, you know, my update here, the Gator Winners Bash, right?
First of all, the weather was fantastic down there. Phenomenal. I'm leaving here in Georgia. It was upper 30s, maybe even low 30s. I think it was like 32 that morning. I left Friday morning to go down and I get down there and it's, you know, 70. I'm like, whoa, you know, it feels great. I'm getting out the car with the jacket and the skull cap I had on. I'm like.
I'm peeling off layers, man. I would be too. I'd be excited about that. I was like, holy cow. So it felt great now and now. The weather was fantastic all three days that I was there. So kudos to that. Good Orlando. But I saw and spoke to a lot of pilots, man. I mean, it was, this was a great, great event. It was very humbling to just get a ton of shout outs from a lot of the pilots about our podcast.
So thank everyone so much for enjoying our show. We do our best to make it entertaining for you guys. And I really do appreciate all the kudos that you guys give us out there. So thank you. That was awesome. Yeah, yeah. And so I did the Archie Jr. thing. Dude, I was wondering, you know what I was thinking about? I was like, you know, at this at this junction last year.
We were all just kind of jumping on all. Yes, yes. Kenny had already been on, but you and I and Nick were all jumping on the Rotoflight bandwagon. This was the fun fly last year when Archie and Hacks set up my bird on Rotoflight for me. Absolutely. I witnessed this. Yep. He was helping people on laptop. Yes, they were. Yeah. Yeah. Neither of them were there. But that was cool. No, neither one of them were there. That was the thing. I was like, holy shit. I got to.
support as best I can now from the knowledge that I have on it. But it was good. Got one of our guys set up. Shout out to Mike Lindowski for getting this bird set up on Rotor Flight. Got it tuned up. We did some... Black box tuning and some PID tuning on this bird. Got it close, you know, flying well out there for him. So he was able to go back. One cool thing Mike did, though, he's flying the FR Sky transmitter.
But he wanted to set up his transmitter for F3C and 3D. So he has a switch that does three modes for F3C and three modes for 3D. Oh, wow. Because you can have all those. There's like six profiles, aren't there? Yes. Yes. Yeah. So he was able to get that set up. And I was like, dude, that's too much to be remembering. Holy cow. It's cool though, because it's not two different switches with three banks each.
It's one switch that changes your bank switch between three banks of F3C or three banks of 3D, which is cool. So your bank switch is still in the same place. All you have to remember is to be in F3C mode or 3D mode. Oh, well, that's pretty cool.
It's slick. So, you know, just, you know, doing the road to flight support stuff was great. I mean, I love when I have to teach people because I learn stuff myself. It's like, oh, wow, I didn't know I could do that. You know, so we kind of learn together. as we get through it. But no, it was fun. I also broke out my MD-500 Skelbert, which, yeah, I have been on Road to Flight as well, but I haven't really tuned it.
And so I took it to say, you know what? I mean, I'm going to take this thing down and tune it since I'm going to have a laptop already out. So broke it out and had a few flights on it and got it tuned very well. So I'm really happy with it. So all you scale guys out there want to. Jump on that Rotor Flight bandwagon. Come on. I got you. We can do this. Your MD-500 was flying great. So smooth. It flew so well, Nick. It was really smooth. And I did a roll. I hope you lost your crew.
How many blades are on the head of that one? I just have two on this one. But the original bird is five heads. Yeah, yeah. Five blades. Duck Darby, you would be very proud of me. Every time Brian rolled his MD 500 inverted, I would yell, violation, violation. There goes your crew. They're gone. Yeah, but that was fun. But yeah, so other than I wrote a flight support, I did get a few flights in with the Wraith as well. So down there practicing my routine there a few times, which is great.
Flying the MD-500 around, which again, very well on the road to flight. So yeah, and then just, you know, hanging with everyone, seeing everybody. I mean, which was really cool walking the flight line and just. you know stopping at each tent how's it going and shaking hands and it was it was great and what they did for gators family was absolutely awesome that was awesome yeah we're gonna talk about what that is for people that don't know
Yeah, so a lot of Gator's old helicopter and his equipment, electronics and such, the family, I guess, really didn't have a need for it. So they brought it all to the event. And Bert and others kind of set it up out and kind of had this auction, silent auction on each item. And whoever bid the highest on the part, you know, would win it at the end of the day or whatever time they did it.
And it was great. They were able to get rid of everything. And there was so much stuff out there. A lot of birds out there, a lot of electronics, just knickknacks here and there. But they were able to sell everything for the family. So that was, it was very, very cool.
Yeah, but there's also very generous with their bids, which was really nice to see. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's what made it special, made it really special. So, but Bert, yeah, Bobby Watts, some of the other folks that contributed to the whole cause. I mean, it was a beautiful thing.
These guys did a great job. And I think Bobby Watts set up the online GoFundMe account. So I think that's still active as well. You can get to it through Bert's page. Maybe we'll post a link to it as well on our page, but it's still active and you can still go in.
donate some funds there to gators family so um you know awesome too about that is on the saturday like a ton of gators family came and stayed for the whole day of the event as well so met a bunch of pilots yeah heard stories of you know our time with gator and it was just great that they hung out and spent time with the community yeah yeah really nice thing so again rest easy gator we down here holding it down for you man so appreciate you
All right, but that's a lot of my winner. That's a lot more, but we'll probably poke at it as we get through the episode here. Okay, so wait, wait, wait, wait. Go ahead. At the last event. There was an area, there was like a disaster area. And you almost crashed on the side of a hill, autoing it down. Did you get to reenact this? So the field is still kind of a...
Not necessarily a dump site. They dump dirt there. I was waiting for you to build a dump. I was like, man, you're about to get some slime. I was going to talk about that also. It's not a dump site. They just have piles of dirt, right? Just big mounds of dirt. Which is really mulch, right? Isn't it? Like mold? This time it was like dirt and gravel kind of off to the left side. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So from the pilot station, it really wasn't in the way.
If you flew too low on that side, you probably would hit it. I don't think I saw any accidents from the mounds. We saw other accidents, but not there. But no, it was fairly decent. And they had a nice little landing mat. at the station that a lot of folks took off from. And hell, I even autoed to it. So it was really good. But yeah, much improved since last year, for sure. That wasn't a knock to the torches field, by the way. It was more like...
I wanted to know if Brian attempted to auto on unlevel ground. Yeah. But no, I mean, I think the field is so decent now, too. Like I even asked Steve, I said, Steve, think of this idea. that we host an F3C event here next year sometime. So he was like, oh, that's a great idea. I said, I'll tell you what, let me talk to the F3C community, the folks that, you know, live down here in the Southeast that normally attend these events.
And when I say, you know, talk to your board and see if that's something you guys would like to do. If so, then let's plan it out. Let's make it happen. So nice. It's a good idea. Yeah. But yeah, so my time in Orlando was great. It was awesome. But got back home to the cold weather. But one of my primary things to do back here was to start prepping for our build party, which is going to happen.
This Saturday, the 20th, you guys will probably hear about it in our next episode. We'll give you updates, but I'm going to be building an XL Power Nimbus V2 that you guys saw me post pictures on Facebook some time ago. It's finally going to get built this Saturday. Are you interested in a Nimbus Nitro that's on Rotor Flight? No. Oh, okay. No, it's the electric guy. This is going to be my practice bird, just to do some tests and maneuvers and stuff out.
This would be a great machine for that also. Yes. Yeah, I'm sure it will be. But no, guys, so look, our very own Mr. Nick Wisdom posted this very cool video. online and how he preps his electronics called the electronic dry setup, right? And he basically gets the motor, the ESC servos and FBL, get them all connected on the bench.
and just does a base setup on them, right? It's brilliant. I mean, it's awesome. Especially, you know, for us doing a build party to do that well in advance of a build party. It's great. It saves you at least an hour or two just getting the electronics set up, right? Yes, it does. So today I worked on getting my electronics kind of dry set up and ready to go. So now I'm just looking forward to our build party.
Cause I know it's going to be crazy. So yeah, it's a shame. It's a good way to cheat too, because you get the servo horns on while everything's out of the bird. So it's faster. And then all the guys who go to the build party that don't do that are like. How are you already that far? It's because you already did all your servos, your ESC, your telemetry setup, like all that stuff is done. Yes, sir. So I appreciate that, Nick. That was a great tip. Great tip. But that's my update, man.
Yep. That's my update. I'm just looking forward to your build parties coming up in a few days or is it next month? Yep. Saturday, Saturday, Saturday. Nice. We're already talking. Every year it gets earlier and earlier. We're like, all right, we got to start. So I think this year we're starting. Nick, what are you building? I'll get there. There's a bit of a story. Alex's Nitro. Yes.
Oh, I can barely handle OS. I'm not going anywhere near YS. This had nothing to do with YS. It was just a bad thing that happened. I know. You could stick a bearing in any motor? No, I can't. Well, thanks for that. It's been brilliant dialogue. Crank bearings, thrust bearings, you name it. Yeah. Put them all in there.
I have been so busy in the hobby, so busy in the hobby, but like in the best way, like happy way. You gave up airplanes. I haven't flown any of the planks since we spoke last time. That's good. But I will eventually. But I did fly the week before the winter bash. I just flew one day and all I had with me was micros. It was when I was on my way back from Charlotte. So got a bunch more flights on the V3 Pro and the S2 Ultra. Ooh.
i still need this is like my inbox right now is just people asking me which one's better not like a ton of people but i don't know everyone everyone wants to know and i'm still gonna say the same thing i need more time on the ultra and here's why and this is funny right because y'all are gonna make fun of me because you know you get out of rotor flight and yet i have found myself on the periphery because of guys i'm friends with of the folks who were creating the new tune for the s2 ultra
So like on a near daily or every other day basis, I get a new set of firmware for the ESC and for both ESCs, the tail motor and the main motor ESC, and then a new tune to put in. And so I've been doing a lot of rotor flight updating on the S2 Ultra.
And it's getting better and better. And I kind of want to wait till the final tune is ready before I compare the two, because I think it'll be the most fair way to do it. I was curious too, when I picked them up, it just felt heavier. The S2 Ultra did, but I don't. compared to the m2 v3 pro it might just be me but it felt like it weighed more i'm curious if they're similar i have a scale like not far from me so when when you start your update i'll run over and grab it and i'll tell you nice um
I now have both of them on V control. They both have Mikado receivers in them, even the one with the rotor flight, which has been fun. So that's convenient. It just means not bringing an extra transmitter to the field. Nice. So you started getting all the telemetry working with V bar.
not yet i'm still waiting on the sensors there's been some postal issues on the capacity sensor coming from micado so otherwise no telemetry currently not at all i didn't do that on purpose no it's fine i just run them on a timer right now But I have more on that idea in the future coming up in just a minute. All right. I did some simming. What? I did some wireless simming. I finally set that up. You don't like to sim.
I hate to sim and yet I've just been jazzed. So I simmed. That's freaking cool. So that's cool. And then I kind of bought something, but not really. It's close enough. Kind of two things. Does that mean it was given to you?
kind of yeah given is the wrong word it's been given to me at greatly reduced cost um essentially okay at cost i don't actually even know i haven't gotten an invoice yet so but i will have to pay some amount of fees of tariffs and taxes and what did you what did you get you're taking some costs so i gotta give a huge shout out to heli direct to goose guy and specifically to team manager sean hall
because he helped put all of this together but uh soon to be in my possession coming to me straight from china is a goose guy rs7 ultra oh nice nice And I'm going to do a detailed build video on it, as well as we'll do a review here on the show on the helicopter as well. So I'm looking forward to being able to share my thoughts in a future episode. I guess they didn't hear the last episode then.
Well, they didn't hear it. That was your comments, not mine. You're entitled to your opinion, of course. I will say, so at Winter Bash, Jose showed up. What's Jose's last name? Rafael, right?
I don't know. Jose Rafael, who's a fantastic pilot. He is. Showed up with a couple of Goose Guy RS7 Ultras that he was given by Goose Guy when he was out at the Thailand heli blowout. And they look... i know the photos some of the colors look a little dark the colors are much brighter in person the red looks great especially and the design i don't you know i remember when the raw came out i felt like
the photos of the raw i was like i don't get it i don't like this kind of ugly i don't like the way it looks and then i saw it in person and i was like oh this is nice and then i went on to own three of them i think eventually i've owned a bunch of raws yeah so
The RS7 Ultra is a lot like that. It grows on you when you see it. It's a really nice looking helicopter and it looks really well engineered. I concur, yeah. No matter how much you think it looks like a goose sky, it does look really good. Oh my God, it is a goose sky. Terrible. Dude, I was only doing the ugly duckling thing. Sorry. It does. That was good. Yeah. Nice. That's cute.
But I was stoked when this Ultra thing came to pass, especially because, I don't know, one of my kind of goals for the podcast has always been that, like, manufacturers would send us things to, you know, test and review. And so when that happens, it makes me happy. That's cool. Good. Congrats. Thanks.
So looking forward to digging into that. I've been watching Sean build his this week and put out content on that. So that's kind of got me all jazzed up and staring at the tracking number every day as it slowly makes its way over, works its way through customs, et cetera. But should be here. Hopefully could be as soon as tomorrow. Maybe Monday. We'll see. All right. I also bought something else for the build party.
which is kind of funny. I had a few options for the build party. One was the RS7 Ultra if it got here in time, but that's not going to happen. The other was I my orange Ill Goblin Pro is really like sun faded at this point because it's had a lot of flights on it. So I ordered a new canopy set for it and I have some ideas to doll that up. So SAB. What color?
I'll tell you later when I post pictures. I don't want to talk about much yet. What? What? But it's, I guess, green and gold. No, it's not. It's red, white, and black. And I've got some ideas. It's custom. Is it custom? It is a custom scheme from. So I'm excited to get that on, but that's now been stuck in Hong Kong for days and days and days. So who knows when that's going to get here?
so that failed to come through it i'm like man i don't want to buy another helicopter but i want to build something because i love the build party and it's super fun yeah um i thought about fixing the specter 3 blade at the build party but i was like yeah that'll be annoying i'll be missing a part and then i'll get grumpy and stuck and have to stop
So I ordered the AK420 HDX edition because it's only $250 and it's wicked cheap. And I had some of the electronics. So it's just going to be a fun little 420 build. which will kind of inform me for our budget helicopter episode we're going to do at some point. So it's just going to be a fun, easy, chill build. Nice small helicopter. And something fun to tool around and completely not care about.
That's what I'm building on Saturday. That was my backup plan. I'll fly it for a little while, probably sell it and give it a good home with another beginner somewhere. Yeah, I have the regular 420 they have. It flies really good though for that size. Bunch of them here in Atlanta. Guys seem real happy with them. Great practice bird. But in order to save money, it seems ridiculous to put a $300 plus Evo on a $250 helicopter.
That's funny. So I still have a Nexus FPL. So I'm going to put a Nexus FPL on it with a Mikado receiver. So I got that all figured out. And interestingly, and I had some conversations with Archie about this. i'm going to run only the rpm wire from the esc into rotor flight and i'm going to run the telemetry into the mikado receiver so i will have capacity telemetry on the 420 cool so so it's a good experiment for that to get that figured out and it's funny
I made one post online about having this Mikado receiver with a rotor flight and people are polarized by saying that out loud. It is hilarious to me that some people are like, you can't do that or whatever. Just the comments. Yeah. but you're getting the best of both worlds man exactly and i also know it's easy like the sxc tune for the ak420 is just done it flies great for everybody nobody messes with it so
I already threw that on Rotor Flight this evening, so that's all ready to go. Got the servos all set up, centered, motor, all that stuff's ready to go. So that's great. All right, winter bash. Sorry, I have a lot this week. travel to the winter bash was potentially the dumbest idea i've ever had which was i was in phoenix on wednesday and i worked till about 5 p.m in phoenix and then i took a nap for 90 minutes then i went to the airport then i flew overnight to atlanta
landed in atlanta at 5 30 in the morning i went home i was got to my house at about 6 30 and my goal was to leave the house within an hour now the car was already packed and loaded from before i left for the trip so i basically just like ate some breakfast talked to the wife
sent the kids away to school and left for the six-hour drive at 7 30 in the morning made it to torches in the afternoon exhausted and just kind of set up the tents and tables and then went to my hotel and fell asleep so that was thursday but highlights of the bash Weather, like Brian said, was amazing. It was like hoodie weather, like 55 in the morning. And then you were in t-shirt and shorts by the end of the day. It was 75 degrees. Light breeze the whole time. Just perfection.
the field man i felt bad so brian talked about that dirt that was dumped in the corner apparently none of that was there two weeks prior to the event and then oh man you know they were pissed about that yeah and then it showed up one of the members just showed up to fly and was like, what the hell? And the city had started piling a bunch of dirt. They actually piled a bunch of dirt directly in front of center stage, but they were able to get the city to flatten that at least.
but it made this sort of lumpy tall grass thing at center stage. That was only about like maybe max height, 24 inches. So still pretty low. Um, but that ended up being kind of a nice treat because guys like Kyle Stacy were flying.
crazy hard all weekend and playing with the grass and dipping it was kind of these uneven mounds and people are dipping helis in it inverted and dipping the tail in it and just doing all this cool stuff that was fun yeah even with that flight station to the left like about 100 or 80 feet messed up with the mounds you still had the far left flight station like where brian was talking about
And it's big enough. They probably, if they had to, could probably turn that into two left side flight stations, I would say, you know. if they really could but i'm glad they didn't because i really love that giant flight station yeah it was just one big expansive one which is nice to have for if you want to do big air stuff or something else yeah it's wild and i also like where the sun is when you're over there on the left it's always behind you and it's great
Oh yeah, in the morning and stuff. It's a really cool station. Yeah. So you can get there early and just start flying over there, which I love. The problem this year, and we love you, but Raja parked himself over there. For his 25 minute gasser flights. Let's go Raj. He was a gentleman and would land after 10 minutes and let you get a flight in. Oh my God. So, so during your update, I got to mention this.
We were sitting there, I think it was the Saturday night when they were doing the night flights. You know, Raja lost his tail, like, in the night flight. And I got to see Raja botching Otto for once. He actually, like, his tail went out when he was just spinning around. He told me about that, yeah. Yeah, he's done a million autos, but that just goes to show you, you cannot always save everything or do an auto. You know, he tried and it still spun around.
It ended up out there in the middle where the taller grass you were talking about was, and it just kind of did a small amount of damage. But yeah, it's the first time I've ever seen him botching auto that I can think of. Yeah, I saw him the next morning. I don't know if he lost the tail gear or what it was. No, well, what did he say? Yeah, I think the set screw came loose. That's what it was. Yeah, so the tail just let out. He just lost the tail, right? Yep.
And so it hit hard enough to pop off one of the pitch links and I think crack another ball link. That's it, dude. Like the blades were good. Everything else was good. He, you know, got the tail put back together. got another pitch link put back on there, and he was just test flying the mechanics on the pitch link the next day. He was like, yeah, this is a bird that crashed last night. I was like, what?
It didn't hit too hard, I don't think. I think the other pitch link I saw was off. But that just told me when I saw him do it, I'm like, what? If he's going to have this happen, you can't always save it. It doesn't matter how many autos you practice. It's still any moment you're surprised can be the...
moment you're going to crash too you know yeah absolutely absolutely back to the bash so i will say i i think this is my fourth or fifth year at winter bash and it was just awesome to see everybody it's kind of becoming like a home field away from home
kind of feeling when you go to this like going to the same event like that four or five years in a row that's how i feel about the arizona funfly because i went there like four or five years in a row it was like i couldn't wait to see those people again yeah yeah there's like i mean brian already talked about this the vibe there was just chill like
there was no drama no team nonsense just everybody getting along being happy to see each other and flying and just having a good time and you know the crew at torches does a great job every year And I don't know, it was just kind of great to see everyone and hang out. I talked so much on Friday and Saturday that I felt like I was going to lose my voice.
A ton of people, like a humbling amount of people came up to me and said really nice things about the podcast. And honestly, that just like means the world to me. So thank you to those of you that do come up and say something. It means a lot to us.
you know been sharing some of the comments but it's just great stuff yeah it's really really good to hear and it makes all the effort we put in worth it for sure and i had some great conversations with speaking of podcasters with mike and carrie from the lone star podcast in texas who made the long drive out there so got to chat and fly with them a fair amount so that was nice um fun to be around they really are they're a riot
I got to say, you know, when you hear someone's voice all the time, you start to build this visual of what you think they might look like. They don't look anything like what I thought they look like. And I don't know what I thought they look like, but I was just.
i don't know there's something about the texas accent that like creates this image that's different or something i was just like don't they both have handlebar mustaches i don't know what i thought but it's just different not bad just like oh cool yeah But man, you can tell who Carrie is. Like, I didn't even like know his face at all. And I just heard him talk to say to somebody and was like, hey, Carrie, how are you? It's a very distinct voice, which is funny. This is one of my favorite parts.
of the weekend was watching kyle stacy pull a different brand of helicopter out of his car every like 30 minutes and beat the absolute snot out of it at center stage oh yeah um he put this flight down on the tron bk nitron 90 that was like mck style on the deck in the grass man blades in the dirt constantly like it That helicopter had 99 lives on that flight. Yeah, he posted videos beforehand like, I'm just getting started. Yeah, right. He was flying awesome on that thing.
oh it was amazing i keep looking for a video of it because i really would love to make it the rotor replay because that flight was my favorite of the weekend but i have yet to find one so if you've got a flight video of kyle with the nitron 90 let me know
But man, just beats the absolute snot out of it. He was flying the Tron Elite. I don't know if he had a Spectre Electric with him. I forget. He might have. It could have been somebody else's. I don't know. I lost track. Just a ton of helicopters. I flew. frank's specter nitro until the battery came disconnected and that got put in pretty hard um just you know having a ball hanging out with buddies throwing down that was really fun to see
I'm going to butcher your last name, Patrick. Patrick Kruski? How do you say his last name? Kruswicky. Who's Ricky? Also throwing down some fantastic flights out of him. you know, all the torches regulars. I didn't see bird fly. Now I think about it, but Manny Nito was having fun out there. That's cool. Who else? All kinds of folks. So that was awesome to watch. The Urcha cup was really fun. It had a much more.
amateurish feel to it not like amateurish it just wasn't like Kenny Ko and Min Chain Kim and like Kyle and Patrick like those guys thrown down against each other it was like some of the locals from torches so morgan shaw put on a great flight and is it john allen i'm gonna get these names wrong sorry i should not try and do names but so a bunch of the local pilots participated which was great to see and some other talent
jose rafael put on an amazing flight on the rs7 ultra it was flying it like it was not one of a couple prototypes in the country at this point kate sir and papa put on an amazing flight and ended up taking second i don't know we'll talk about results in the news but like The Urcha Cup was just a fun one round, like an hour of watching cool flights kind of thing. So I thought that was really successful. I hope we do more contests like that in the future. Yep. In a personal note.
I think this is the first time I've kind of like been around people that sort of know me.
in a while and i'm pretty excited to say i've lost 55 pounds at this point thanks crazy i saw those pictures and said something right away nick looks good guys he looked yeah he looks like a whole new person now yeah and so there was also a bunch of people coming up to me and saying like oh my god you know like it's awesome good for you and um you know everybody said nice things about that that was awesome here so thanks for that
i did lots of testing flights on the goose guy s2 ultra in the morning so i'll get there early and then like knock out a few flights on the latest firmware and stuff i did notice on the s2 ultra it's really sensitive by the way if you've got one of these to blade tightness so if you over tighten your blades you start getting elevator bobbles so
If you've got a bunch of elevator baubles or you just change blades out, loosen your blades a little bit for sure. Oh man, so much more. Oh, Alex, I crashed for you again. I saw that and I was so happy it wasn't me.
you're welcome yeah i'm sorry for your loss so the spectre 3 blade first of all the spectre 3 blade on version 8 is flying amazing it is butter smooth just i love that thing love it it's flying fantastic it looks it's a great looking helicopter if i do say it was awesome looking um so i go to flight station and patrick's over there and frank mortieos and a couple other guys and
They're all saying nice things. Some of them took pictures of it before I took it up, which is maybe the kiss of death. And I put it up, and it's flying great, and I'm only about 90 seconds into the flight, and I'm about 100 feet up. just finished the maneuver ended up up top going right to left and at a pretty good clip and then all of a sudden it goes from upright to inverted facing towards me in about a half a second like it just goes like snap
And then the motor shuts off and I have no control. And I watch it just blade stop and fall 100 feet to the ground. And my heart just sank. You had a V-bar control link and kiss you, huh? No. No. I'm enjoying these V-bar pokes, by the way, if you're a V-bar fan. I'm just messing around. I'm just joking, sort of. So, I'm walking the 100 feet or so through the high grass to get to this thing, and...
I look at my radio. It was that far out. Yeah, it's like 100 feet away. Oh, man. It's just fine. The grass isn't that high. And I look at my radio, and it's disconnected. And I'm like, okay, well, maybe that's just the battery ejected or something and it hit the ground. I get to the helicopter and I can see the light on the Neo. So the Neo still got power, but I'm not connected to it anymore. And I'm going, what would cause that? So take a look at the helicopter.
All three blades, the main are done. The boom is completely severed. Like you took scissors, the cut is so clean at the rear boom clamp and it's just hanging by the tail belt. The nylon bolts on the bottom of the blackout mods frame did their job. The skids popped off and are in mint. Like I just need to put new nylon bolts on and the skids are good.
quick look at the frame set the frame set is mint not a scratch on it that thing is tough as nails so i'm really stoked that the blackout mods frame survived so it looks like it's going to be main blades and some i think the main shaft might be tweaked a little i'm still digging into that but the tail is perfect i went through the whole tail today pulled the tail shaft out ran it on glass it's fine like the whole tail is fine the tail blades are fine
So that all survived perfectly. Tail fin's fine. Tail case is fine. So I don't know when the boom sheared, but it saved the tail from having any damage. So I bring it back to the bench, and I'm like, why did it disconnect? And... there's this anger building inside me that like if this is mikado related i'm gonna rage sell all my shit before i even leave the fun fly like i'm just mad because like i i can put a helicopter in myself but if like
you lose connection in flight like that's concerning so and i have done all the things to protect myself i've got the you know the long life battery i've got the dynamic power module in it so like i should not have lost connection so i look at the logs And all the log says, everything is like hunky-dory, hunky-dory, hunky-dory. And then it just says at the exact same timestamp, you know, V-bar disconnected, Hobbywing ESC disconnected. So nothing in the log that's helpful.
So Ron Thomas from Mikado is a few tenths down. So I walked down to Ron and started talking to him about it. And he was like, well, download the log from the cloud. You usually get more info. So I do that. No more info in the cloud. So the disconnect.
And by this point, there's a few folks around my tent trying to figure out what happened and what's going on. And after close inspection, I can't remember who found it. I think it was Juan found it. But what caused it was there's a small... sort of hole well not small good size hole half inch inch across something like that in the esc plate where my motor and esc wires are routed to kind of keep everything super clean on that heli and one of the motor wires chafed against the carbon edge there
To the point that wire was exposed and it shorted out against the carbon frame. And that short caused the Neo to reboot in flight. And that'll do it. Damn, dude, that sucks. That will do it, yep. it's my fault i should have protected the wire in that position from chafing but i was all excited by how clean the wiring was coming out and i didn't go back and do something about it and so it's not mikado which is great i'm glad to know that that was not it
And it will live again. I have a pile of parts over there. Unfortunately, I keep discovering more things I don't have. So I'm on my like fourth parts order at this point. It got the canopy. Today's bummer was I realized it got the swash plate that the swash is. mangled in some way that i can't see but you can feel it if you spool up the heli you could feel it in the swash and it doesn't spin as freely as it should and the ball bearing in the center of it is not good so
I could take it apart and try and figure out which part it is, but I just ordered a whole new swash and I'll figure out which parts are good at some point and keep those. So that was that. So that was the one bummer, but I got to say. Everything else I brought was flying great. The Old Goblin Pro was flying awesome. The Nitron 90 I got a bunch of flights on. That was flying great until it wasn't. It started to get a little bit lean on me and I figured it was just the regulators. So I...
Took two regulators apart in my hotel room, soaked him in alcohol, got him cleaned out. That's funny. Got those back together. And then on Monday, the nitro was flying great again. So that's all that was. What else? What else? What else? What else? What else? So Monday.
So I ended up staying all the way till Tuesday because I could. And my wife said, do you want to stay longer to fly? Because you usually show up. I usually get there on Tuesday. And, you know, since I went later this year, she was like, I want to take a couple more days and stay and fly. So I did. So I flew all day Sunday.
Monday was the first day that it got a little cold, so the temperatures dropped to about 55, 60, and the wind was a steady 15 to 20, so that felt a little cold. But I still flew, I got the Nitro, and then I installed Mikado's 8.2. on the helicopter on sunday night i didn't want to do it ahead of the fun fly in case something went wrong so i tested 8.2 out on monday and some i can detect some definite improvements there
got a little bit more head gain in things just feel a little bit more locked in small increase like you know five to ten percent but just another improvement so that was good I just want to give a quick shout out. I will name some folks at Torches to Steve Shaw, contest director, Pat Mock, Carl Meadows, safety director, and Burt Kammerer, who always jumps in and does a lot of work with the Torches crew.
Thank you to all of you for a great event. Thanks to everyone else at Torches who was there helping out. And I don't know, it's just a great event, just a great vibe. And last thing I want to say about the Winter Bash, and then I will shut up, is I think Bert did a great job with the raffle.
as always but I gotta say the thing I missed the most is not hearing Bert and Gator argue about how they should do the raffle for 15 minutes yeah and in the middle of the raffle Gator telling Bert he's doing it wrong and Bert telling Gator he's doing it wrong
And, uh, I don't know. I miss that. I miss you Gator. So, uh, that's all I got to say, but great event. I hope they call it the Gators winter bash for forever for as long as the event continues and keep it up torches. Nice job. Yeah, they did an awesome job. All right. That was a lot. Sorry. Kenny, you're up. Do I have anything left? I mean, you covered quite a bit. You and Brian both.
I don't know, some of the same stuff, man. The field was not bad, the way it was laid out still. I mean, even with the mounds there, there's still, what is there, like four or five flight stations down the main road, and then the one off to the side, so not really a big deal.
I got like, my trip is my drive and stuff. You know, I got like 15 hours down on Thursday. So my whole Thursday is a drive. And then usually Thursday night, we don't go to the field because we get there later, you know, so I stay down.
near you know where universal is down that area and we just got dinner and hung out for a while walked around and then went to bed and got ready for the weekend you know get there on the morning on friday i think on friday morning i was actually pretty surprised that There was actually more people than I expected. I got there, I think, 9 a.m., and there was a decent amount for just a Friday morning. Sometimes you don't see a lot of people just rolling in until noon or something like that.
It was pretty packed. I ended up going down to the far end on the right, and I didn't realize that we had a table and a canopy set up down there where Nick was and everything. But that worked out good. I had both ends. I could go back and forth. cover both ends of the field, which was kind of cool too. Yeah. Yeah. It was cool to see that the, the goose guy guys were there and had a whole ton of, they had like 15 helicopters, I think with them. Oh yeah. What were you flying?
I brought the Nitron 90 for Nitro, and then I brought the Tron Elite and one of my RS7s also. Very cool. And I brought the little Micro M2 V3 Pro. You're liking the Elite. Yeah, yeah. Actually, what I realized on that, I went too fast through my setup. You know, I just kind of skimmed through it when I set it up and I took, I think, the file off of my other Tron, my Advance, when I put it on there.
So I realized I'm down there, you know, my first flight, I was flying over on the side to Big Field over there with Nick and I think a couple other people were standing there and I'm messing around and I'm like, man, this thing's just like too fast or something. It was rolling really crazy quick and everything. And I'm like.
Something doesn't feel right, you know, completely compared to my other models, like the pirouetting or the flipping, like for, for doing just pyro flips was kind of out, you know, I couldn't keep it centered. And I went back on the bench after that flight, the first flight when I got there and I started looking at it.
And I had like way too much cyclic set up. It was supposed to be set like 10 and a half or 11. And I had like 16 or something crazy, 15 and a half, you know, so it was given, it was given way too much throw basically. So. I tamed that down. And then after I did a few more flights with it, then I was liking it a lot more because it was a lot more controllable, you know, for smaller movements and pyro flipping and stuff. Cause I was just, I was going all over the place with it before.
But it's a very precise, fast machine. It has a different feel to it than the Advance for sure. That's cool. Yeah, I went back and forth with the RS-7 and flying that both, and I'm starting to get the Elite tuned in better where it feels better.
i initially thought i have gotten to fly one briefly but there was a problem with the way the motor was mounted and it was slipping the motor was slipping inside the cage like it the set screw had come out of the motor yeah so i didn't really get to beat on it i'm looking for i think you can really fly this helicopter hard like it's a real you can do abrupt stops with it you know and fly it really hard or robotic or smooth or however you want to i think it'll yeah
It'll take quite a bit more than the advanced fly is great, but there's just a little more rigid frame to this. So it's a little more compact and low profile. So it has a little different feel, but I think it can take quite a bit.
I think all the models are going that direction. You know, the new ultra RS sevens kind of like that too. They've kind of made it more compact and shrunk down the same way. And they're all getting to be where you can really fly them, you know, beyond what you used to be able to do with these size models.
yeah and blade noise aside man they're getting quieter too i feel like the elite and the ultra were like the two quietest models at the event yeah yeah it's definitely sounds a lot quieter especially the new like that big hearing bone gear is actually super quiet you hardly hear it
doing anything really just the blade noise so the m2 i got out i think patrick was down at the right side where we're at on i think it was saturday afternoon and i was just messing around with the m2 off to the side and behind the flight station on the little
I flew underneath those little yellow banners that they put up. I dove under one of those and then I hear somebody like, fly under it inverted. So I'm like, okay, turn around, fly back, inverted, tail first under it, made it through just fine, did a flip out of it.
And then I think, I think Patrick walked back there and he's like, do it pirouetting. I'm like, okay. So then I go at it again, pirouetting inverted. And I made it like under the little ribbon banner thing and like, you know, foot off the ground. But then it like.
Got crazy sideways on me and I hit the weeds and sit on the ground. It was funny. They were like calling out to have me do stuff under there. But yeah, I just got out of control on the last one and hit the ground, but didn't do much. It just like. cracked a servo arm, which I've actually not, that's the first thing. What helicopter was that on? The V3 Pro, the M2. Yeah, they're pretty stout, but I hit it head first. They're actually pretty good, dude. I've crushed mine quite a bit, and it's...
I've had to change servo arms, but nothing crazy. I think that's all I've broken. I think maybe once before I did, and both times it was just because I landed on the head, but everything else is still good, which is nice. I really thought that the boom was going to break easily.
doesn't i haven't had to change the boom yeah i was expecting that also i haven't i'm still in the same boom too after probably 10 or 12 crashes that were you know some of them were pretty good too expecting it to be broke yeah it's held up yeah it looks fragile but it's not Yeah, I had some of the same stuff, like Nick was saying, like that Kyle Stacey flight. He did a flight, I think, after the competition on Saturday.
And I thought that one was good, but he actually, I think Friday's flight was even crazier. If you guys saw that or not, I don't know. But man, he was really throwing down on Friday with that Nitron. I was surprised. Man, I wish I could have seen that stuff. It was cool. It was almost like he's only had like two or three flights on it, but he was tearing it up like an inch off the ground everywhere with it really fast. I was surprised. It looked like he was really loving the Nitron for sure.
I want to be able to fly like four times a month, like for three flights at a clip or whatever it is Kyle was saying he flies and be that good. Yeah. That'd be awesome. I mean, he's got it down. He's committed the time, so.
Yeah. You know? Oh yeah. Definitely. Yeah. We got to do lunchtime. Alex breaks all the time. Uh huh. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. You don't get there just by waking up one morning and being that good. No. i used to ask ben stork that all the time and he was like practice like there's no secret yeah
I got more flights, I think, than I've ever got down there. A lot of times I'm just doing stuff and I only get like two or three a day. And this time I actually was able to get like seven or eight each day, which was awesome. I ended up with at least, I'd say 16 to 17 flights, which was... Plenty for me down there. Nice. Don't normally get that many. I did about the same, about six to eight a day. It was great.
Yeah, even though there's that many flight stations, there's always an opportunity, depending on when you're going out, but you can always find an open flight station or something to get a flight in or two. I only did my nitro. I think I only flew it like three times, but still that's more than I was expecting. Cause sometimes that's more than I've flown my new one. Three flights in two days. Congrats. That's good enough.
I did get some. So let's see. What else did I do? I don't know. Flew, talk to everybody. Yeah, the raffles went great. The event went great. Bert and everybody did a great job. I didn't see anything crazy. Did you guys see any like... I mean, other than like when I mentioned Raj's, I think I might've seen a few crashes, but I didn't see anything spectacular, like nothing insane, no, no lipo fires, no, nothing weird like that. Right. Did anybody see anything like that?
There was that one really loud crash that sounded like a midair, but there was only one helicopter in the air. And the canopy went through the blades and it fell out of the sky. I don't know whose that was, but... Well, that always makes a great noise. Yeah. A few crashes, yeah.
Sunday like I always get up Sunday I don't usually go back to the field we went to Cocoa Beach down there and hung out and you know just walked the beach and checked out stuff down there and had lunch and then we came back to Orlando after that Other than that, it was just a trip home. But my trip home this time, I took a different route and I went towards Alabama and went and got some fuel on the way home. So I picked up some nitro.
Nice. For the next whatever, you know, however long it lasts me. Picked up a few cases. Speaking of nitro, I mean, it's just like, I thought about this as like, this would be something really a topic to cover in a way is fuel costs.
from what they were telling me you know this is morgan fuel for cool power but it looks like across the board that all the nitro has went up quite a bit like in the past three to six months like i think What they were saying is that the synthetic fuel oil has gone up so much, like 70% or 80% of the cost that it used to be for them to buy it, that basically everybody had to raise it.
It wasn't really the nitro. The nitromethane, I think, is costing the same. But how do you guys think this is going to affect the hobby? Do you think people really use enough fuel that it's really going to put a damper on things? Or do you think it's just going to be like...
get what you want still and nobody you know just goes with it i don't mean i think guys might prioritize electrics a little bit like you know i'll bring it to a fun fly and i'll only get three flights on the nitro instead of the other way around but
I don't think it'll stop anybody. Yeah. I'm not like, I used to fly nitro a ton and now it's kind of like I take it and I'll fly maybe two or three flights, you know, and then maybe it won't go out the next time I go. It's like every other time I'll bring it. But I mean, if somebody who's hardcore nitro is going to definitely notice the cost increase from like, I mean, like retail is looking like VP's 71 a gallon online and then 50 for full power. I mean, it's getting up there, but.
Well, maybe it will. That's it, Alan. I'm not buying my Nitro back. Never mind. He's like, I'm done. Send that back in. I mean, everybody's either got like, maybe my club can order us this much or I can find the local hobby shop that'll help out or do this or that when they order some because some hobby shops won't even order nitro for helis. But I mean, I don't see any other way to go about it to save money for.
like the helicopter people other than to do something like that where you get a group order or just something where it's a little bit more affordable you know if you're not flying it every day you're not going to notice much of a difference but if you are then it's probably may put a little damper on your
amount of nitro flying you do yeah hopefully things come back down in price i forgot to ask you did you did you take the turbine with you i didn't i mean i just i thought about it i'm like man this thing is so large it is an 800 so it's got 800 millimeter blades on it and to put that in the car is like taking up a whole canopy space or something you know like to put in there so i was like i better just leave this home
I did get to fly it some though and did some flips with it. I just got, I was actually asked Raja while I was at the field about, he said, I probably should use a governor because I've seen online conflicting. Like some people will say, oh, mess with the governor. And others say, just use like.
like a v-curve and adjust it and i've done that but you still have that over speed you know if you come down real fast at over speeds or if you're trying to do pure flips you know it's going to lose some head speed so i think i'm going to try like a magnetic sensor on it and Give the rotor flight governor a try on that and see how it works. Cool. I'm sure I can adjust. I think you have to run just a little bit higher.
head speed on these than you really want to because there's just not a lot of torque there you know so if you do bog it you're already below the the point of return basically you know there's no there's no torquing out of it you have to use the rpm ahead of time basically to make up for it
It's definitely a whole different ballgame. There's no twerking your way out of it? Yeah, you can't twerk your way. You're just not going to get that torque you want. If you try to go down real fast and then overspeed it, but you hold off and hover and then you try to climb, it's going to bog. You have to...
You have to have it covered higher. Yeah. Basically unloading it is when it starts to let off on the turbine. But yeah, I had to leave that at home and I just brought the three helis and the micro with me and played with that a little bit. And I didn't break anything this time, luckily. I mean...
Got lucky on that, no crashes or anything. Long drive home, though. When I went out towards Alabama and stuff, I think my total drive home with stops was like 17, a little over 17 hours. So I got a lot of driving in. Dude, that is so much freaking driving. I know. Do you and your wife alternate who drives or do you just do it all? I just drive. Dang, dude.
I alternate taking gas station breaks and gas restroom breaks here and there just to get up and do something every two and a half, three hours, I guess. Like you stop and even if you don't need fuel, it's good to get out and just get a drink or something and walk for five minutes and then go back and drive some more.
gotten the routine down over the years so it's not too bad but yeah it seems long but the extra drive was worth it to get the fuel that way i don't have to order and have it shipped and stuff so i got an extra three or four cases now that'll last me a year or something who knows how long i find i drove
but that helps out. Cool. I'm trying to think what else went on. Is there anything else crazy? I don't know. I watched some of the night flying on Saturday night, but then once it got kind of, it got kind of late and stuff. So when it was mostly. I think there was three or four flights in or so we headed out when the last few flights were going on. So I'm not sure what all happened actually later into Saturday night, but I got to see most of it. And.
There was some pretty cool stuff in the night flights too with the LEDs and everything. They did pretty good. Patrick was doing one and a couple other guys had their helicopters lit up like whole night rigs, which was pretty cool because usually you're doing spotlights or something and it was all night rigs. Night flying is for the youngins. Okay. I mean, I have no energy at all. I can't even keep my eyes open.
I used to have more motivation for it, and now I don't. I like to do it, but I'm not going to push myself to stay out there and keep my stuff all ready. Once it gets chilly or dark, I'm just kind of like, I'd rather sit back and watch somebody else break their stuff at night. I mean, I think like a day at the, a full day at the field like that, standing up most of the time and then the sun's beaming down on you. By the time the evening comes, it's like, I eat dinner, dude, and I crash hard.
Yeah, you're burnt like after seven hours or eight hours in the sun all day. Yeah, it does wear you down. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't catch the night flying either. And I meant to, but there's something about... torches being at the end of the season end of my work travel season where like i just want to relax and like fly all day and then chill out because it's a vacation as well as a fun fly like i don't want to exhaust myself and go 16 hours a day
Yeah, that too. Maybe that's lame, but I'm okay with being lame and relaxing while I'm flying and having fun. I get that. It's your hobby. Yeah, but I like night flying too. I think the secret to night flying is staying on the field.
Like when you've got your RV right there or you rent a camper, it's great. Yeah, it's definitely different. If you're already there, then it makes a lot of sense and it's more motivating to, because then you have your canopy with lights in it and you're all set up to go. But if you're going to the hotel and you're leaving, it kind of...
turns you off of doing it because you like you know you're gonna be leaving in a little while you gotta pack up stuff and that's kind of part of it I think with me to not want to do it you know what else was really nice about the winter bash is I think This is the most, at a fun fly anyway, that I've hung out with Kenny and Brian in a weekend. We got way more time to hang out and chit-chat and hang out at a flight station or whatever. That was fun.
Yeah, we did. I was like admiring the three blade Spectre and it looked really awesome. And then I come back later. I didn't get to see the crash, but then I'm like, what is this hunk on the table? It's like missing everything. It sucks.
Oh, man. Yeah, that sucks. I feel bad for you for that one. But I mean, it's at least you have an idea of what it is. Hopefully it's all good after that and get it back together because, I mean, it did hold up well. I mean, it looked like there might be a couple little things like you said, but.
But I was surprised that the whole thing held up so well, like the whole frame is fine and just a few parts bent and broken for how far you said it fell. Yeah, it'll be it'll be fine. And, you know, the thing I thought of on the drive home is.
I got away with no crashes for a long time, like two and a half years or something. I had a really good stretch. So it's just the averages catching up with me and it was bound to happen. Yeah, those don't bother me if it's every so many months. But man, if you have one, like you crash and then you go pull another one out of the car.
and crash that it's like it's like getting hit twice with a punch or something you know it just drives you nuts yep like it's not my day I'm packing up yep exactly not bad that day before whoo All right. I think I only saw Brian fly like one time, I believe. I don't even know. It's like somehow missed half of his stuff. Oh, I saw Brian fly some F3C stuff, the scale stuff. Yeah. I flew a total of about five or six times.
Yeah, you were dove deep into ProterFlight there for a bit. I sure was, yeah. Yeah, Mike sounded happy. You guys got it pre-tuned. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was good. It was really good. That was kind of fun to see Mike.
because you could see the rotor flight joy where he likes it starts to click and he's starting to understand and he was getting excited that was fun to watch it's cool oh yeah all right let's uh we don't have a lot of news so let's uh let's rip through a little bit of news real quick And now, with all the news from inside the RC helicopter hobby, we bring you the Rota Report.
back to you alex all right guys spirit has announced there has been or at least has been showing photos of an onboard flight simulator on the wave radio and this is not yet released but the radio will have the capability to allow viewing on a television also so it's like nice broadcasting from the radio online multiplayer standalone mode on the radio screen and with crash simulations so
Static images on the sim are like, dude, the graphics look really good. They do. I want to see this in action for sure. I hope it flies like realistically. How cool is that? yeah it's cool yeah the cool part about this is you can take that transmitter now like to your hotel or you know before after an event and sit there to fly on the screen you know and plug it in or whatever and practice which is really cool or just use it at the field with a small
laptop monitor or something like that it looks like unless you're one of those people who stands up to sim and wears a neck strap in which case you're sol yeah yeah then you're screwed i think most of us just sit in sim right but i don't know that i want to look down
at my radio that much it's more like of a novelty you can try something new if you're at the field before you go up and do it in real life to me like yeah and i think it'll have the ability to cast to a tv it sounds like so yeah yeah they also have dude spirit's been busy so also a new receiver similar in size to the radio master rp3h which if you're not familiar with is about the size of a dime the urx or you know small receiver will support
the spirit s bus and srxl protocols and it can run three to 15 volts full range receiver with a range of four kilometers suitable for any helicopter application they're saying Receivers are ready to ship in mid-December, so hopefully coming out soon. And they're going to be in the U.S. at least $62. You know, it was cool. They were originally listed for like $84, and they got so many pre-orders, they lowered the price.
Wow. That's amazing. I know. I was like, what? This is not how capitalism works. That's unheard of. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Spirit's making me want to try it, dude. I know. I hope they're not cutting prices too low to hurt themselves to try and pull people in because I want people to succeed, but don't sell yourself to, you know, make some money. Yeah. But yeah, it's cool to see.
All right, we have RS-7 Ultra updates. So as we continue to learn more after seeing the helicopter in action at the Winter Bash, here are a few thoughts that we had. It looks... Much better in person than in the photos, as we mentioned earlier. It's not so much a goose sky. It does look really awesome. Speaking of that, the canopy itself, like...
You know, I looked at it, I'm like, okay, the shape is a little bit unique and some people don't like that. But the closer you look at it, like down in the front where it slips onto the new mounts, it's actually really durable. They designed the canopy on both sides, like where it's... slipping into there it's actually three-dimensional so it's not just a curve it's actually arched out so it's more structurally sound it's a real stiff design so it's not
as breakable as you would think it'd be down there, even though it looks very thin in the photos. The whole canopy is a lot more stiff and rigid than what you would think just by looking at it, thinking it's just a little thinner design. It's actually really stout.
I like that the canopy has more area on the sides than the original RS7. I think it's going to be easier to see in the air. Yeah, from what I saw, it looked fine. There was no problem seeing it. Plus, you have the front closed up, you know, like the other... streamlined version that they have now so other than the looks on that it's the drivetrain is very quiet it does have the dampered flabberless mount to filter out vibrations on the tail on the upper mount in the rear
The frame graphics, I was really impressed with this. So on the side frame and on the boom, it's not a sticker and it looks to be, I've never even seen something like this. It's almost like it's painted on somehow. It's like printed or screen printed on. Yeah, it looks like real ink or something, but it's not a sticker and there's no edges to it or anything. It's like it's part of the boom or part of the frame and it's on there good and it looks pretty good in person.
yeah they all they all match i thought i was looking at it so close i was looking at the two other models you know two different models he had i'm like do these even have like were these done by hand and no they do match like they're somehow digitally done but it looks looks pretty awesome with the paint job on the boom and on the frame The tail ratio is a 5.1 tail ratio, so it's got a pretty quick tail, the 8mm tail shaft and the 15mm main shaft with a gear ratio of 8.92.
My impression of it is it's a pretty nice upgrade, I would say, from the previous model. I don't know that the tensioner on the tail is completely needed, but I guess... From what I felt on their models, it felt like they had the boom pulled pretty tight, like the tension was really high. I don't know if that's needed or not, but I guess you have the option now. You can kind of loosen or tighten the boom itself.
you can kind of free up or snug the belt, depending on how you want it. At least you have a little more of an option now because without the tensioner, you either have to get it snug. or that's it you know because if you loosen it up too much you're going to have some flop in it or possibly skipping teeth where now there might be the possibility with that spring that you can back it off some maybe get a little bit more of a free transmission we will see but
Yeah, the overall helicopter was an awesome looking upgrade and design in person. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping is I can slack the tail belt a little bit to prioritize autos and make this, because of its gear, an auto practice machine. Yeah.
Definitely looking forward to seeing how that works out and how adjustable that is, because I don't see on the side, I don't think there's really like a, there's no knob or no spring tensioner design, but you can kind of, I think, adjust it just by going in or out with the boom, depending on how you want to set it. And the spring makes up for that. Cool. Back to you. All right, guys. FreeSky has two new radios. The X14RS, which replaces the popular X14.
and a new version of the TwinX Lite called the TwinX Lite R2. Both run, obviously, the Ethos software that FreeSky developed. The X14 RS has a dual-band 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz internal. rotor radio frequency module high brightness touchscreen and a compact form factor similar to the tx15 the new twin x-light r2 has a new design antennas for better performance
New upgraded top sliders and improved touchscreen as well. And they improved the mechanism in the slider, like the touchscreen slider that slides up and down to reveal more buttons underneath. All right, guys. Well, Nick mentioned earlier about the Urcha Cup. That happened at Gators Winter Bash. And we have the results. I'd like to share that with you right now. So the results here, we had three winners. And there was, I do believe there was monetary prizes. I don't remember the amount.
It may have been, I want to say 500, 300, 200, something like that. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. They did get some nice trophies too, I think, right? Yeah. They got very nice trophies at the end, but Bert was mentioning, he thought there was monetary prizes.
You know, hold me to it or whatever. But anyway, so it was just one round that was flown for the 3D contest. I believe this class was probably like an expert class versus like a master class. But all the pilots were fantastic. They did a fantastic job. So I start in third place and work my way to first. In third place, we have Jose Rafael, who was flying the new Goose Guy RS-7 Ultra. Really cool flight. Second place, we had Katie Sarapampa.
that was flying a miniature aircraft. A funny story by Katie. She brought her, well, she flew in to Orlando from the West Coast, but had a trip from China to California to pick up her birds. Make her way here. But her birds got lost kind of in transportation from the shipping company and never came in. So she wound up flying Grace's manager aircraft. So.
She didn't have to tune it to her liking and then go compete. It was crazy. Wow. But she was second place, which is great. And then first place, we have one of the local pilots of the Torchesville, Mr. John Thorpe, who was flying an SAB bird. Congratulations to all of the pilots and everyone else who participated. I think it was a total of eight pilots that participated in the event. But these guys really were cool. I mean, everybody's flying the music. I mean, it was pretty snappy. It was nice.
One guy, and I forgot who the pilot was, Nick, you remember this guy? So he was flying a Soxos bird and he went up to do some maneuver. Next thing you know, this long streamer shoots out the bottom of his helicopter. He does a roll and he cuts it with his blades and it just, you know, floats on. That was cool. That was one of the socks those guys, yeah. Yeah, it was really nice. So nice little cool, you know, trickery there in the Urchikov 3D contest.
So congrats again, all the winners. But speaking of SAB, all right. Y'all going to leave me alone with this. Y'all better leave me alone with this. Aren't you so excited about it? You know, so yeah, SAB's been teasing us with some more photos of this long promised updated F3C bird, the Genesis F3C. And while there was a whole lot of marketing speak to add in there, extreme stability, surgical precision, uncompromising reliability, things like that. Oh, sorry.
But the nuts and bolts of what they showed were three images that had the following. Let me tell you about them. So you have this one image that was two motor belt tensioners. that help wrap the belt tightly around the main gear, likely for a smoother and more consistent power transfer, right? Then you have this one with the tail push rod that's now inside the carbon tailbone.
Cosmetically, I mean, this is certainly very nice, but we're unsure of the benefit beyond that, right? And one part of it that scared me was the little pitch link there could possibly hit the boom when you...
throw the thing back and forth, but I'm pretty sure they worked that out. I don't know. Have to test it when I get one, hopefully. We'll see. But another picture, too. So we have a... a dampened mount for the tail boom so perhaps limiting some of the vibration transfer to the fbl to aid with improving its performance and requiring less filtering and then what looks to be either an upgraded tail from the ill goblin pro
Or a very similar one. So as well as this high gloss finish on the boom shown in the pictures, which is that great fluorescent light green picture of the second version of the Genesis. Other than that, I mean, there's no other information beyond the, you know, releasing, the releases approaching, you know, so to speak. We don't have a date yet, nor a price. Like I said, we've seen the photos.
And some of the prototypes have been flown by some of the SAB factory pilots. But we'll be sure to let you guys know more information as we learn it. So come on, SAB, man. Come on. Have you emailed them to see if they'll do a Birdsong edition yet and just work with them on that? You know, that would be the coolest thing ever. Maybe they will. Brian Birdsong just kind of scripted down the side. That would be dope. I heard it's available. You heard it here first. It's coming.
It's the BB edition. Tell your friends. Or is it the BBS? What's your middle name, Brian? Lamar. The BLB edition. The BLB. Oh, man. But come on, let me get that bird, man. Let's go. Yep. Screw Kyle. He doesn't get one. Brian Birdsong should get one. That's right. I kid. All right. Quick reminder.
If you are a Mikado vControl user, so I heard about this at the Fun Thrive, and apparently it's caught at least two people off guard. If you're still on version 7... and you are upgrading your bird to 8.2 now the same thing happens if you upgrade to 8.1 but i think when you upgrade to 8.1 there's a bunch of warnings that may or may not be there when you go to 8.2 i'm not sure but anyway
I've heard of some folks going from v7 to v8.2 and not triple checking their setups, which Mikado is very clear in the instructions that you need to do when you upgrade to v8. So what happens is if you go straight from 7 to 8.2 and you don't check, it might in...
The translation process, moving your file up to version 8.2, it can change either gyro corrections or control directions sometimes. So you have to just make sure left is left, right is right, forward, back, tail directions, and all your gyro corrections again. I know in most Mercado releases you don't have to do that, although you should anyway with any FBL, but just take a minute, double check your control directions and your control throws when you're upgrading from 7 to 8.1 or 8.2. All right.
This part I'm kind of excited about because it's cool. So I saw RC Helicopter Richard put a small poll out on his YouTube channel that got just a few responses.
about which fly barless unit everybody was using and i was like how do i get a wider like amount of responses so i threw a similar poll with a few more choices on the heli direct heli addiction group on facebook which is a moderated group so you know you have to enter answer entrance questions to get in there so it's you know a dedicated group of i forget how many at least 7 000 helicopter folks and i asked them to select their primary fly barless unit that they use in their builds
if their builds involve using a flybarless unit that's purchased separately so if you buy a goose guy rs4 and it comes with goose guy fbl like you don't get to answer this poll the results are kind of eye-opening so at the time i pulled the results they're about 500 votes You could only pick one response, and I'm going to go from last place to first place. So in random order, the choices were Icon 2, Brain 2, Spirit.
spectrum 6250 or similar jr trinity futaba cgy 760 or 770 rotor flight and v bar and from lowest to highest here was the split this is kind of eye-opening so jr trinity with two percent obviously a brand new fbl so it's going to take some time to gain some traction futaba cgy 760 770 two percent as well so those two jr and futaba are kind of hanging at the bottom right now
spectrum users 62 50 or i think there's a slightly newer version now as well three percent of the market that's surprising yeah yeah well is it though i mean there's so many like guys who fly a lot of airplanes and have a helicopter that it you know yeah that's what it is i'm surprised there's more of those than futaba yeah and when you're you know two and three percent there's probably the numbers aren't very different between those two one guy didn't click
Exactly. Spirit FBL gaining market share here at 6%. So they're doing better than Futaba, doing better than Trinity, and doing better than Spectrum. In the poll of people that responded. In the poll of people that responded. And yes.
You can find flaws in any poll ever. I just don't want someone coming back saying, Nick, you said this and it's not true. That's all. Oh, I know. This is a poll. These are the results of that. But I think that... while the numbers may not be exact i think it tells a story that's accurate and i will say that our results track pretty closely to richards as well which is a different poll run in a different spot
in a different country and not that his followers are not his followers are obviously a nation or worldwide too but yeah yeah icon 2 brain 2 is at 12 not surprising that's been around a long time has a lot of faithful users this is awesome and I love this because RotorFlight is next up. It's an open source project built by modelers on hardware that is super inexpensive. And RotorFlight currently has a third of the market at 32%.
is amazing unbelievable um and basically a year like yeah and i know it's been out for longer than that but it became more mainstream about a year ago right yeah and we've seen you know all of the major teams releasing content on it talking about it us talking about it so the movement is is growing so 32 of the market share despite the difficulty of the system as well is awesome i love that thrilled thrilled about that
And V-Bar still holds the top spot in this poll at least at 43%. But, I mean, you gotta, you look at these numbers and you see new players like... you know, Spirit and Trinity and Rotorfly combined, that's 32, 36% of the market right there. And that had to come from other FBLs. So, I mean, it seems obvious to me that V-Bar is losing market share. They're still doing well.
still on top but they've definitely like when you went to an event years ago where that's pretty much all you saw everyone had a v control dude yeah everyone yeah so i don't know i'm psyched to see how far rotor flight has made it
it's great to see too that spirit is beating out some of the you know the others spectrum futaba trinity etc trinity is still new so i don't know that these results are super significant you know it takes a while for word to spread and i agree to build momentum spend the money yeah yeah
It's only been out for six months. Yeah. So I don't think JR is going to stay there, just where it is right now. So I don't know. I thought that was cool. Super interesting to me. I love that stuff. And it made me think, and this is a question for listeners. I think it would be really fun, and I hate to give out the idea before I figure out how to do it, to do a really big state of the hobby kind of poll. So what's your primary, you know, or what brand of helicopters do you fly?
you know radios are you flying like one of those big surveys like pick your transmitter pick your fbl pick the brands of helicopters that you own and fly pick your blades that you own and fly and prefer And just have a quick survey that would take folks maybe five minutes to complete with a bunch of those questions. But the challenge I'm finding is unless you pay a lot of money to somebody like SurveyMonkey.
How do you get a poll that you can only answer once that teams can't collaborate to alter the results? So if you know how to do a survey that we can keep more accurate and make it less susceptible to people cheating, hit me up.
Because I'd love to put something like that together, but I don't want to do it if I can't get good, honest results. All right. Road to replay. Do we have a road to replay? I know we talked about some great flights coming out of Winter Bash. If we can find Kyle's video somehow. i know well if you hear this episode on the day it releases and can send me a link to kyle's nitro flight video somewhere we'll be sure and put it up on the page so y'all can see it all right events so
Last time we got a bunch of new events for 2026. We focused on sort of the first half of the year. For this one, we're going to start in May and work our way towards the end of the year with what we know. And then we'll keep hyping the, you know, earlier season events in future episodes as well. So I'm going to go ahead and kick us off with the Buckeye Bladescrape. That event's dates are now set for May 1st through the 3rd in Delphos, Ohio.
$40 pilot's fee gets you in the door and includes lunch on Saturday, lots of giveaways and raffles, food available daily, electric nitro turbines, even gassers are welcome. Even gassers? Yeah. Can you believe that? I'll let anybody in there. I guess Doug's going. Okay. So we got the Cincy Smackdown has announced the dates for this annual event in June 4th through 7th. Be sure and hold the dates in your calendar. More info to come. Oh, that's where the bird classic.
Sorry. Got you. Suck it. The Whirlybirds Classic event will be June 11th through the 14th. Again, that's June 11th through the 14th in... charles missouri st charles missouri landing fees 30 bucks and there will be a pilot's dinner on saturday there's dry camping ac power in the pits check out stl whirlybirds.com for more info Cool. The Hoosier Heli Hangout is happening near Fort Wang, Indiana on September 25th through the 27th.
Have some top-notch flying sight featuring five flying stations for free camping and light towers for night flying. So check that out. Hoosier Heli Hangout. Southwest Heli Rodeo wants you to know the dates for 26. That's right. 2026, next year's event, will be November 5th through the 9th in Coolidge, Arizona. Is this where we can see Flat Alex?
yeah if i'm not there maybe i'll be there or be flat just ship it all right if you've got 2026 event dates we want to hear from you send them to us hit us up on facebook or on our email and send us the info. Welcome boys, I'm Fabian Klaus and listen to Rotar Evolution.
all right we knew we were going to chat a lot about winter bash and we've gone on long enough now so we're just going to do a little mini main topic a little bit appropriate for the holidays this was a question that came up in our chat from alex alex you want to tell us a little bit about your question well yeah you know it's holiday times and typically when people are holiday shopping for others they end up accidentally picking up gifts for themselves as well
And I know for guys that are in the hobby, like it'd be nice, I guess, to get gifts in the hobby. But how do you really navigate that? Because typically in our hobby, we know what we want ahead of time. Maybe we bought it at Black Friday, or maybe it's something that's really just kind of too expensive to ask for a present for someone to get you in the hobby.
How do you guys navigate this? Like, do you have a strategy? Like, it's holiday times. It's a good time for me to get a new helicopter. Whatever. I feel like this is the selfish episode. How do you take care of yourselves in the holiday and the hobby? Maybe this is my time to step in and say... I got one more thing. Oh, I like it. It's I bought something. So that's how it worked. I like a week.
So like a week ago, I did go ahead and ordered the new RS7 Ultra. When they popped up that orange canopy, I was like, okay, this is the buy it now button. So yeah, it's hard. around the holidays it's hard because you decide you're always buying you know this hobby is just like that you're like oh this came out I'm getting this or I need a new set of blades or whatever it is but then I don't know when I tell people it's just like maybe I need a gift card or something
Because it's hard to tell people what you want, you know, that kind of stuff, unless you know exactly what it is. I mean, even telling someone, if you tell someone, hey, you can get me a, like they're looking for a cheap gift for you, I'll take some tailblades. No one wants to give you freaking tailblades, dude. Yeah.
You're better off with just getting a hobby store, you know, one of the online stores gift cards or something. Because even asking for like an OMP M3 Pro, that's a big ask, you know, for. Yeah. a small gift for yourself. I, you know, I, you know what I find that's good for holidays for, for yourself is any, any tools you may need, right? It might be time to kind of look at the workbench and see if you're lacking some, like for me, you know, my vinyl.
printer went kaput on me and so I want to buy me a new vinyl printer for Christmas so I think I'm gonna invest in one because I like to you know print certain designs out put them on my canopies and things like that so it could be tooling you know there's also some pretty cool new electric screwdrivers that are out that are much smaller using thin lipo batteries yes
Yeah, I think tools is a great idea. I love to do like stocking stuff for things. And I also look at expendables around my shop that are not exciting for me to buy and I don't need right away.
Give me a pack of 100 lint-free towels or Loctite or epoxy. That's cool. Yeah, I like that. More like... MIP drivers best driver in the business but they're expensive like if you don't feel like spending $35 on a screwdriver let somebody else do it and they'll feel like they're buying you a nice tool so I like tools expendables build mats
I like clothing too. Like all of my hoodies that I haven't been given, I'll ask for. So like you can get hats for most of the helicopter brands sold at most retailers or hoodies or any of that stuff. I'll ask for that. You know who does a great job of apparel is SAB. They have like some good looking stuff that's out there, dude. They do. And if retailers don't have it, you can get it straight from SAB sometimes.
So that's good. Clothing is good. Or also just clothing or comfort items at the field, whether it's a toolbox, carrying case, clothing to fly outside, sun hats, sunglasses, you know. You can find kind of ancillary things in the hobby. Those are good ideas. Or like heated. You know what I've found recently is people who have cold hands. Brian, who can't stand the cold. They have new heated electric gloves I've found.
recently oh cool so that's cool too yeah i got some usb hand warmers they're like things you hold in your pocket and wrap your hand around that'll warm your hands between flights Yeah, I have good Allen drivers, but I need the ones with the flatheads and Philips. I'm always having trouble finding those kind of tools when you need them, like good Philips heads that are small and stuff like that's awesome to have. Yeah, and there's tools you may not have, like nut drivers.
You know, if you're mainly using an adjustable wrench for now, like some nice nut drivers are good. All kinds of stuff. You know what amazes me though? And I could never, ever do this. Have you guys ever done this? Where? No. You decide. Black Friday or just afterwards, Cyber Monday, whatever, you're going to get yourself a kit for Christmas and you talk about it with your wife and it's all budgeted and accounted for. And then...
You do the unthinkable and you wrap it and stick it under the tree and force yourself to wait till Christmas. No, it's built by then, dude. There's always somebody who posts a picture of like a wrapped kit under the tree every year that's like, can't wait to open my Nimbus on Christmas. You're like, what are you doing? If you were this person, I have a request for you.
Okay. Christmas day or whatever day you're opening gifts and you've got everyone around you and you open your new kit for the first time. I would really love a canopy on the head pig on our Facebook page. Like. I didn't do that recently, and after I built my kit, I was like, oh no, I didn't put the canopy on my head. Wow. I love canopy on the head pick, and your friends and neighbors will be happy too.
Yeah. I'd like to see some canopy on the head picks for Christmas. That's a really good trend. I think from the bill party, we're going to, you know, when we finish building our birds, we'll take a picture with the canopies on our head. Thank you. Head canopies. I want to see this. Okay. And there's cheap gifts from your family too. Like give me a pack of six coupons to fly on Saturdays that I can use at will. That is true too. Yeah. Or some sexy pictures of me with my helicopter.
No, no one wants that. No one wants that for Christmas. Can you make a calendar of me posing with my helicopter and I am the center of attention? Yes. No, no, please don't. Oh my goodness. Build mats. I just keep, I keep looking at my bench over there and there's just lots of things you need in the workshop. I've never had it. I want, I want, I want one of those little filled enclosures where you just kind of poke your head up the top of it and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Or a golf case to travel the fun place. Oh yeah, that's a good ask. Those aren't too expensive. I mean, they are expensive, but it's not like buying someone a model or something. Yeah, something you'll use for... a long time until yeah what else what did you guys ask for for this one did you ask for anything hobby related i i've been a bad person and i've Bought everything that I could possibly want in the hobby. And I told her not to get me anything at all this year. And I sincerely meant it.
Just have her wrap up the boxes of the stuff you bought and put them under there and you can be excited a second time. That's a great idea. Just a bunch of your empty boxes. Oh my God, dude. I might wrap a helicopter canopy and put it under the tree for myself. Is it going to be from you? Yes, it will be.
From Alex to Alex. It'll be the surprise gift that no one knows where it came from. I'll just sit there and be like, who got me this? No one will know. And I'm going to put the canopy on my head. I'm doing this, guys. Canopy on my head. You got it. With a bow. Okay. So I asked for one of two gifts. Well, two different gifts. And I told my wife, you know, pick which one you want to give me. I think I wanted a...
A pair of those metaglasses, you know? Yeah, they are actually pretty cool. I think I want to get them because I really want to record myself flying. I want to see. They're really good for that. When you remember to push the button. Okay, yeah. So I want a pair of those. Or I would love this leather recliner that I found online. I was like, holy cow, that would be like my seat in the living room. And the dogs can't get on it or anything like that.
pull the little lever and kick my legs up and just relax. They have a room. So yeah, they're not hobby related, but. That's what I want. I've used them glasses. Like I've had them about almost a year now and using them while you're building is nice.
you can record like a clip of what you're doing and show somebody if they're trying to figure something out a couple times that's really another thing is the quick ai answers like you can just be like hey meta it is really cool what is this if i have this gear ratio plus this plus that divided by this what is
it and it's going to answer it right away with a detailed you know without even picking your phone up that's really nice on hand like on the fly that is cool now now kenny at the at the tip of it does it have like speakers for your ear you can hear or oh yeah dude you can play everything
The listening part is bone conduction in your ears. You hear really good sound through them. Wow. But you can still hear everybody around you talking really good also at the same time. They're really pretty neat. I might have to do that.
And you can actually tell it to record or you can hit the button on top by holding it down for like two seconds to start recording. You can say, hey, Matt, I start recording. Yeah. I think you get a longer recording if you hit the button than you do if you say, hey, record this, right?
I'm not sure. I think it only does a certain amount of time and the newest one might go a little longer. Three minutes is the longest one I've seen. Yeah. I think they're limited to two and a half or three minutes. But yeah, that's a good thing, especially if you want to document your progress. Just for your own sake. Yep. fun fun and for cheap gift ideas like assorted metric screw kits from amazon they have tons of sets of of you know two and a half three millimeter whatever
You can tell your wife I just want to get screwed and center link. Nice. Those glasses are $50 off right now, too. They're on sale. The regular version is like $229 or something, which isn't too bad. Jeez, that's not bad at all. Holy cow. They've came down. They're pretty impressive for what they are, dude.
Yeah. Yeah. You guys do any flying around the holidays or is it all family all the time? Do you guys do like New Year's Day flying? Normally I sneak out and ghost fly on New Year's Day. But this year, because I've been so focused on the hobby, I'm trying to... do a better job of family stuff, so I'm planning on staying home. Okay. But typically I get out and play. New Year's Day in Texas historically has been a glorious day. Yeah. Nice.
Well, I'm excited because as much as I love my family, my wife just took our two children to go on a ski trip. they'll get back just before christmas i forgot about that so i have the house to myself so i can build and take care of some projects around the house and hang out with the dogs and fly i'm gonna send you one of those
Memes of must be nice every day for the next week. Don't worry, I have a long to do list. So if I get behind and and in exchange for this, I have to wrap all of the gifts for everyone. So there's that. But it's a fair trade. I'll take it. Yeah. I just don't fly in the cold. So if it's cold, nope. I'll probably just, I don't know, be on the bench or the sim. Dude, it was raining yesterday here and I like wanted to go fly like I considered going to fly. I wanted to go so bad, dude. That's awesome.
Well, I just realized this episode is going to release on December 23rd. So we can say Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, whatever you celebrate. Merry Christmas, Merry New Year. Merry, Merry, Happy New Year. All that good stuff. Do we have an episode? No episode releases before the new year. This is the last one of the year. This is the last one of the year. And you know what this means? It means we blew right past our two-year anniversary without mention, which we're good at.
This is the episode that they're listening to while they're blocking out all the in-laws. Right? Yeah. They have their meta glasses on and they're listening to something. We didn't talk about our goals neither. I guess we could do that next episode.
oh yeah we gotta do that too um we got lots to talk about we got that next episode will be called one more thing it sure does and we got the tron elite inspector ultimate review to do we got lots to do yeah yes 2026 baby but yeah thanks for uh thanks for listening thanks for hanging with us for two years thanks for all the comments at the funfly and on messenger and facebook and everywhere else so
I've enjoyed doing this for two years with you guys. I honestly, when we started doing this, I didn't know how long we would do this for. Yeah. It's been more fun doing it than I anticipated. So thank you guys. Yeah. No, I feel the same way. It was, it was for me in the beginning, I was, I was like hoping we get to six months, you know? Right.
Yeah. And it blew up and I absolutely love recording with you guys. So yeah, we have to keep this thing going, man. Yeah. I mean, even when I was kind of feeling the burnout, I was like, well, I'm enjoying this aspect of it a lot, you know? Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, I look forward to it. Every time. Even when I'm tired and grumpy, it like turns me around every time I look. No doubt. Even with the Barry White voice, man, I just keep, you know. Yes. Yes. Take us out, Barry.
All right. Well, again, thank everyone for listening to the show. And we will hear from you in 2026. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. That's awesome, man. You got one more, Kenny, or can I press stop? Happy holidays. This concludes this episode of the Rotor Revolution RC podcast. To learn more, stay in touch with the team, and to join the revolution, check out our Facebook page at facebook.com.
Rotor Revolution RC Podcast, or find us on the web at rotorrevolution.com. Help us spread the word and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. For listener questions, advertising inquiries, or to reach out to the entire team, email us at questions at rotorrevolution.line. Thanks for listening.
The nuts and bolts of what they shower were three images that showed the following, right? So we had this one image that had this two-motor belt tensioner. Hold on, Brian. Sorry. It's a typo. It should be showed, not shower. You might want to redo that line. He totally just read it like Ron Burgundy. I knew Ron Burgundy'd it. I'm Ron... I'm Brian Birdsong. Okay, all right. Let me start. Bye.