Episode 78: It is all about that tail

Let's do this. All right, guys. Welcome to another episode of Skids Up Podcast. I'm Steve, and let's go. Who's here with me today? I don't know. Some weird Canadian. Frank? I'm here. Darren, you go first. How's it going, eh? All about it. All about it. All right. And then we got Frank here. What's happening, guys? Where's Javier? Javier is not here today. He flaked out. He keeps talking about this rash. I don't know.

His rash he got again? Oh, boy. So, yep, Javier couldn't make it. He has, I think, like a parent-teacher thingy or something. So, yeah, we're here without Javier. So, I'll be kind of leading us today. This is episode 78. All about the tail. Oh, yeah. It's all about that tail. I mean, Sammy would say, I love big booty Latinas.

all right do we want to catch up do some catch up first yeah sure sure yeah all right who wants to go first okay i want to go first and i never go so i want to i want to talk about do i got so i got some toys I guess. Don't talk about the planks. No, no, no, no, no. I am getting another plank for Christmas. That's kind of like my Christmas birthday gift to myself. It's a used one, but it's from a good friend, and I'm excited for it. It's a size I don't have.

I don't have a 90-inch. It's a little different than most of mine. I have a lot of slicks. I actually have three slicks. But this one's three different size slicks.

uh planes and this was an extra ng on scorpion a big 90 inch electric so it's gonna be a lot of fun to fly it's gonna be like an oversized foamy so i'm excited about that i just don't want to crash it so i got i got some helis and i'm very fortunate um so i got a lot of exciting stuff to talk about but let me talk about the helis first i um i got a wraith

which i wanted to build for a while but i i wasn't motivated to it so i got that so i'm going to start hopefully building that here pretty soon i got the new nitro xl power nitro with the updated shaft and gear ratio. So we're going to get that good power out of it, even though my original, actually my prototype is still flying. And I've had that for like almost three years. You know what gets you a better tail? What? When you have a better shaft.

Oh, no. This is going to be one of those episodes today, isn't it? Oh, man. Especially if it's lube. Especially if it's lube, right? Works awesome. You know? You gotta put that go-go, dude. You gotta put that... Yeah, that... Nitro's like women, dude. They self-libericate. So I got that. So I got the Wraith, I got the Nitro, and I got the three-blade Spectre Ultimate. I haven't got the new Fancy Canopy yet because I didn't have the patience to wait, but I got it, and I'm going to...

Hopefully have both of those flying by the end of the year, maybe. I got to get some other goodies. I'm waiting for some data servers to come in stock so I can order some. and I'm waiting for the new 220 SE, or the one that's the latest one out, to come back and talk to order it. Do you not have one with the Tribune 3s?

I have one, but it's on a helicopter. Oh, okay. And I have another one, but that one's going on the race, right? So the one for the ultimate, that's the one I'm waiting for. So I gotta order the... The... the esc and the two motors and i'm having a hard time figuring out blades because uh as you guys all know i'm an azure uh team pilot

But they don't make a 750 size. So there shouldn't be any issues. Kenny won't care, you know. But I don't know what kind of blades to go with. So if you guys have any good advice out there. Send me a message on Facebook and I'd love to hear it on which blades are you guys using? You know, believe it or not, when I had my 800, my T-Rex 800, those Align 760 blades are actually pretty good. Okay.

They are, I actually really liked those blades. They were, and I'm not, you know, I, I, my, my old standby favorites are still the old edge blades. And I'm, even though I'm running rotor tech mostly now. But man, those old Align 760s, I actually quite like those blades. They were actually really good. That's not a bad idea. Well, that's true. I mean, the race is not a 3D machine either, right? No, I'm going to just...

I'm going to be a flying planker with that one. Or fly it around, do a little mild 3D by rolling and things like that. Yeah, just big old wolf. I want to fly like 1,300. SAB makes 747s. That's like that 750 size right there, you know? I could, I could, yeah. And they still make the color one. No, I got the, I'm going to call her the pink papaya. because i got the i got the pink canopy for it nice it's not really pink but let me see let me actually have it here uh it's like purple and orange

So I kind of like from a distance, it kind of gets a little pinkish. But I got some pink in the boom because the wonderful lady that packs up my helis at... at XLPowerChina sent me the wrong boom, but she's so sweet and kind that I can never get mad at her for it. It still kind of matches, so I'm excited about that. Cool.

Are you actually thinking of trying some F3C stuff then too with it? No, sir. No, sir. I just want to fly a big old stupid machine. Big old just crazy. I like 1300 head speed. I just want to hear the blades just cut. I'm flying my Genesis Sport at like 1150, 1200. I had a lot of pitch when you run low head speed. Yes, you do. Okay. Yeah, like 14, 15 degrees. Yeah. When I used to run my 700 at around 1400 or so, 14, 1500, I used to run about 16 degrees a bitch. Yeah.

You can go up there. So that being said, I got my blades from Azure. Nice. I got a bunch of three blades, like a few, two blade sets. What else? What else? I started a new job. Oh, yeah. How's that? Oh, it is crazy. You know, you get used to certain things, and when those things are no longer as complex or the issues... You can really appreciate things, right? So, yeah, it's a great company. I have a similar role to what I had before, but I'm a little more on the client side, which is okay.

but yeah the work's really good um the people i work with are really excellent my boss is three hours away so i'm in i'm in coral gables which is a part of miami and my Personal I report to is in Tampa. Really cool guy. You know, the firm has been around. It's been a Florida, like it started out in Florida from Orlando.

CEOs, really, really cool. Everyone that I've met so far, it seems like really good people to work with. So I'm excited about that. Yeah. And I get a bunch of more vacation days, so I'll get to go to more events. Nice. Next year. Are you going to have just as much time on weekends and whatnot to go fly? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Actually, probably more now because the roles are a little different. You know, I don't have to.

I'm not signing and sealing, which is essentially a big part of my last job. I took a lot of my time. And that's somebody else's problem. And I'm not doing QA, QC, which is quality control, quality assurance director, what I was before. And that ate up a bunch of my time. So now it's got to manage a few projects, help out with some processes, and, you know. Nice. Keep it good. So I'm very excited. Looking forward to being part of this firm. Nice. So, yeah. I don't know. I hope that, you know.

Everything goes well. Cool. Any events? Oh, no, not so far this week. I'm going up to hang out with the, I call them the rednecks of Sebring. Jay Kerpa and his group of people there. I'm going to go over there and hang out with them and hang out with some of the tortuous people that are coming down. Hopefully Mr. Shaw. The president of torches. Very soon. Very soon. Yeah.

We should just start calling him Mr. Very Soon. Dude, I told him, it's funny, I told him I would not go to Torch's Winter Event if I didn't see the Spectre built. He's like, so he's actually gotten a lot of progress done on it. I'm like, all right, got enough progress on it. If it's not fully completed, I will still attend. Oh, now you've let him off the hook. Now it's not going to get finished.

No, no, but he said he will have it ready for me this upcoming weekend at Sebring. So we'll see. I'm not going to fall for it yet, yet, but...

He has made some progress, and I think he's made more progress on that than he's done on all the other helicopters they had to finish in the last, like, three or four years. So I got to give him some kudos. What else? What else? Oh. we might have a someone that stepped away from the hobby coming back you know he's a very local friend of mine uh so he he just bought a helicopter

Mr. Ernie, Dr. Rekit, my nickname for him. He came back on one of the chats for all the local guys, so it's exciting to have him back flying helicopters. So he's going to hopefully be able to make it to Sebring. We got to figure out how to get him out here in the future. He has a lot of shit to say. Very funny guy. Nothing but love for him, though. He really...

He's one of the best people around. He definitely picks for an exciting show. Heard lots about him, but never met him. Oh, dude, yeah. He's a blast. He's a blast. You can find the videos on the Hangout of him crashing. It's pretty epic. He's excellent at it. He is. He's the best at it. The one year, were you there the one year that he crashed like seven times at RCHO?

No, I missed that. That's the year you went to Arizona, I think. Yeah. He was on wild form that weekend, man. He crashed. He destroyed. He just... Yeah, it was all about good times for him that weekend. That's when he's the best at it. That's when he's really having the most fun. Outside of that, getting some flying here and there.

The weather's finally starting not to be killer hot or, you know, just horribly heat. It was really nice this weekend. I got to get some a lot of flying. I even got to fly my big Bushmaster, you know, little planker. Planking around, you know, enjoying the time. I'm just saying that for Darren because he's been giving me crap about... Planker! Planker, yeah. You're just jealous. You know, I'm not a planker. I'm just...

What does Juan call me? He calls me a planker sexual. I come out once in a while, shut my stuff, and then go back in the closet. Even I will admit, actually, those Bushmasters are pretty cool airplanes, actually. They really are cool airplanes. Trying to lift off and land scale like they do, with the flaps all the way down and just shooting up in the air.

It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. I got to get a hold of Peter Rousseau so he can do some of that fancy setup he does on him. I want, so my flaps are not controlled by the gyros. And I want to be able to do that because when I hit the flaps, it usually kicks the nose up of the plane up because, you know, I don't know how to... Yeah, that's usually all they do is just mix in some elevator. Yeah, show me how to do that on V-plane, and I'd love to do it.

i'll give i'll send me the setups i'm all about it you show me how to do it i don't i have no idea because i don't i have v bar on an airplane and i don't actually use v plane i just have just straight have it just as a straight receiver so oh my god what a peasant Oh my goodness. It didn't really, the plane I have, it's an old, um, 3d hobby shop edge 540. Ooh, boy. Yeah. It's a nice little crunchy.

um it's only the 41 inch it's not the big thing it's one of the smaller the 41 inch wingspan but man as that is as far as planks and airplanes go That is truly my favorite, all-time favorite airplane to fly. Like, I really do enjoy flying that thing. It is a lot of fun. And to be honest, the darn thing is so stable and yet so aerobatic that I've never really felt like I needed to put V-plane on it. I just sort of went, eh, I'll just fly it with the receiver and it just flies amazing. I love it.

That's awesome, yeah. I am completely back on the VVAR train. I tried the Rotoflight and it's... yeah it's a good system it's it's a good system like i'm not gonna lie i can't talk shit about it i couldn't i couldn't i couldn't get anyone that knows um rotor flight don't you have all those rotor flight guys down by you dude i do

But I couldn't get the nitro to work on it. And if I have to swap between radios back and forth, it's just not going to work. I'm not saying I'm going to sell a bunch of stuff, but if you're in the market for some used Rotoflight stuff, I'll give you a stupid deal on it. I am not afraid to give away some shit that I'm not going to use. I'm still going to keep the radio and, you know, find a use for it in the future. But, yeah, I am back on the V-bar train hardcore. And...

Um, yeah. And I'll be converting some of my helis that I had on real flight back to V-bar because, um, yeah, guys, I'm not gonna lie. It's... It just felt right this weekend. I don't know what it was. Getting to fly my 700 Nitro again because I took the V-bar out of it because I needed to get it service because it was one of those first generation Evos.

but got all replaced. Brian at Mikado USA. You're my dude, brother. You're my dude. Thank you so much for everything you've done for me. Just lucky. I'm just a lucky guy. So, yeah. So, I, um... That's about it, man. I'm looking forward to the Winter Bash. Haven't been to any events since, um... Yeah, Mr. RCHL, man.

Oh yeah, I couldn't make it this year. Oh, I was at Helix. I was at Helix. Yeah, you were at Helix. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, since Helix, I haven't been to an event, so... Fuck, that's what, three months? Yeah, that is well.

Almost three months, it's been two. Because LX is the beginning of September, right? Yes, it's always first weekend of September. Last weekend of August, first September. It's a long weekend. Yeah, so... yeah other than that excited for the future looking forward to building some helis getting some new goodies i i'm excited to that for that and uh steve you want to take next

Uh, sure. Yeah. So what have I been up to? Um, flying a bunch, having fun with it. Um, you know, every Sunday do my thing. I did go to a couple of events, but before I go into that, uh, Let's see. My 520, I think the last time, I was having some issues with that. Yeah. And I had several issues with it. So the first thing I noticed was the Neo was shutting off on me. And I thought it was like...

Was it the ESC shutting off, which was shutting off the Neo? But I run a buffer pack, so the Neo was shutting off on me. Take the Neo out, and I start playing with it, and as I push on the Neo board... It would like power up and then I let go, shut off. Ooh, cold solder joint. So yeah, something's, no, it's beyond, it could be a cold solder joint, but it's.

it's not like part of the pins or anything like that. It's somewhere in the board. Yeah. Like, like I put a microscope to it to see if I can see like, you know, any like, solder joints broken or like you know pads that don't have solder in there or something and I couldn't see anything and I put a ticket in with Mikado and they're like yeah that thing's old

There's six layers of like, you know, wires in there, like, you know, PCB. And like any one of those layers get broken. It's like, yeah, it's pretty much done. It's not reliable anymore. That thing's probably been crashed many times. Many, many times. It's a very old Neo. So I retired that Neo and put another one in there. And then the following weekend, they...

This was actually at the handover event. The 520 kind of shut off. Flip. No damage. Was able to land it. No damage. But this time it wasn't a Nioh because I had control. So the ESC was having some issues and I was getting some overcurrent issues. Wow. Interesting. So, you know, like, I hate double shooting. Is that the one you're running on 5S? It's 5S, 6S, yeah. I run a mixed set of batteries on them. So some flights I do 5S, some flights I do 6S.

And so it is that heli. And so anyways, I replaced the ESC on it. I put a XD Fly 125 on it because it's one of the cheaper ESCs. I really like the SD Fly ESC. So previously I bought like a 195 to try out on that 12S RAW that I was setting up, the 580 RAW 12S I was setting up. And I flew it a little bit, and I sold that helicopter. But I had a good experience with that. It had good V-bar integration. The telemetry and everything looked like it worked well. So I bought another one for the 520.

That helicopter. It's so good to have that helicopter back flying. It's flying fantastic right now. Nice. That XD fly, that one's capable of some other... Yeah, it can do a DSHOT and all that stuff. Yeah, it's capable of some of those other formats. It's one of those CSEs that can do all the different protocols. But it...

But one of the things I love about this ESC is something as simple as the fan on it, right? Everything comes ready to go pre-installed. The fan's already mounted and everything, right? But the thing is, the fan turns on. only when it needs it. So it's not like always running. Like my YG, it would like, you power it up, it would just always run the fan.

I think a lot of the brands are like that. The fans are just basically power and ground. They're just hooked up to power and that's it. They're just hooked up to the EEC output. They just get BEC power and that's it. This, they're smart about it. So it only turns on when it needs it. So it doesn't kind of like sit there spinning. And, you know, these fans eventually do wear and fall apart. So like, it's nice that the fan will probably last longer because it only uses it when it needs it.

And something that's like very, what is the word for it when you're, I guess, vain? When you want to like match a helicopter, you know, wiring and things like that to make it all look matching and nice. Okay. Bougie. You're bougie. I call them cycles, but I call them cycles. Yeah, OCD, I don't know, whatever. But you know how like, you know, so there's an LED on ESDs usually, right? That kind of indicate that it's on.

This one has an LED, but it's programmable. So you can program it any color you want. Not any color, but within a range of 10 different colors. Pink to red to orange, whatever. You know, white, blue, like just the major RGB colors that you can do with those LEDs, which is pretty neat. You know, like I like orange, so I'm like, cool, I'll just turn it to orange, you know. And it's fully programmable from the V-bar.

Like I didn't plug into a computer. I didn't, I didn't plug it into a, uh, you know, like, uh, like hobby wing does with their, like, you know, um, battery checker thing, USB update or thing. I didn't have to plug into anything to program anything. the air thingy that i despise yeah or like the bluetooth thing or do you know like yeah the bluetooth thing yeah no none of that stuff like you plug it in just like you would plug in to the helicopter to get telemetry and all that stuff and then

you have the menu there, you, you know, you can set the color, you can set the rotation, blah, blah, blah, all the timing, you know, all that fun stuff. So, so I like it. I like, and it's the cheapest ESC out of the, the main, you know, ESC brands, I guess. Um, and so far it's holding up to any abuse I can give it. So we'll see how, you know, longevity goes, but, um, you know, I probably got about 20 flights on the CSC already on the five 20 and it's, you know, rocking.

It's awesome. Nice. Just a note, though, for folks that might ask this question about the Gov, I am running VBAR Gov on the 520 because I switched between 5S and 6S. Because of the voltage difference, I let the V-bar take care of the head speed management. So I don't know if the XD flight gloves are good or not. I don't know if the Scorpion or Hobbywing or YG store gloves are better or not, you know, so on that front, I'm, you know, I have no experience, but yeah, just wanted to note that.

um let's see beyond that uh i got those meta ray-ban meta glasses i've been doing a bunch of videos uh you know for my social media um pages and stuff i've seen a few yeah and uh your uh fire your fire flight yeah yeah i'll talk about that when i get to the part but uh so but these videos i think and you know kind of producing not producing but like uh releasing a bunch of videos like

one a day I was doing for a little bit. I've really, like, I've been seeing a lot of my, like, the following trend on my account go up a lot. Like, I think in the last, since Urcha, I was probably around like 1,400. I'm more on like 2,200 now. So like I probably increased since Eric Shelley. Wow. A third more like, you know. went from like 15 or 1400 to about 22 now. So every day I get like 10, 10, 15 notifications. They're like, you have new followers. I'm like, Ooh. Nice. Nice.

Yeah. So I'm like, I'm trying to keep pushing these, you know, daily little video clips out so I can like see if I could like, I don't know, make it to four, like three grand, you know, like let's see if I can make it to, you know, more. He's going to get a YouTube play button yet. No, but this is all Facebook, though. I'm not doing any YouTube. Oh, you're on Facebook. Oh, okay. That's the Facebook one. Yeah, so YouTube, you know, I don't think I have that money. I don't know.

So what I got to do is I got to convert. I got to get the people that follow me on Facebook to also follow me on YouTube. Because if I could get, if I have my 2,200 on Facebook and I think I'm about like 1,000 or, you know. then there's potentially a thousand people that can also follow me on there. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, interesting about the whole social media stuff. I never really paid attention to like how many followers I had, but.

I don't know. Facebook makes it really obvious, so I've been kind of paying attention to more these days. Cool. Beyond that, events. In the last month, I went to two events. I went to Hanover at Helly Smackdown. and RCHO. Hanover was kind of the beginning of the month of October. It was fun. It was small. I had a real blast with the Hanover guys. It was just fun there.

This was like the last RV camping trip, I think, for the year. So it was fun. It was a good trip. And it was close by. So it was like an hour drive to the field. set up my camper and, you know, with the kids and everything. And, yeah, it was good. Unfortunately, I do have some bad news about the Hanover. This event will probably be their last because they're losing their field. Oh, man, that's horrible. Yeah, come March. They need to be vacated, you know, March of next year. You know.

It sucks. That's frustrating. It's a farm field, you know. It's a field that lies on a farming land. And, you know, the old farmer passed away. Kids have inherited it. And, you know. probably hear this more often than not, is that the kids aren't going to follow the dad's old business. They're just going to sell the land, right? Yeah.

So I think they're either going to sell it or do some solar field renting to it. So in any ways, no more Hanover Club there. So they are looking for a club. So if anyone knows any big open fields in...

Central Southern Virginia. The Richmond area. You know, let me know. Let's see. Beyond that, RCHO. So RCHO, famous or infamous. Where Hellies Go to Die. Yeah, Where Hellies Go to Die. That place is a Disneyland, you know, Disney World of Hellies for sure. They have made tremendous amounts of improvements to that field. Not only did they get now proper power, like, I don't know, 200, 300 amps, whatever, like proper power there.

So no worries about generators running out of diesel or generators failing or having issues or overheating, none of that stuff. You don't really have to worry about bringing your own power because they have enough power.

they had someone running their whole RV off of the power. Like, you know, it's not a big issue. Man, that must be nice. So that's really cool. Beyond that, though, they've been like... pushing back the tree line so much at that field oh really yeah like that field feels bigger than it's ever been and you know it's not saying much for a field that's in an industrial parking lot but

It really, you know, has like, um, they really done what they could with what they have, you know, the best of it for sure. So. Man, I need to get out there one day. You do. I do need to get up there one day. It's one of the few places that it's kind of hard not to love that place. Don't get me wrong. It's not... It's not Triple G Aerodrome. Yeah, I've heard that. It's a nice, very clean place. Not like it's saying it's dirty or anything, but...

It's a little grimy. I'll say it's more like dive bar-y. You know, like when you go to a dive bar in a city. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has a charm to it even though it has that like... It's the hell equivalent of cheers. It's where everybody knows your name. You can't go wrong. There is no better. I tell you what. If they don't know your name, they will. They will, dude. You will make friends there. It is hard not to. It's hard not to. Jay and the rest of the crew, they do an amazing job. I've...

Kenny, I can't say enough good things about them. You know, I get mad at myself when I don't go, when I don't go out to all the events, but yeah, you know, well, I noticed like, even when I went to Helix, the guys that I ended up hanging out with the most was a bunch of the guys from RCHO. Oh, yeah. Because they're just so welcoming and so friendly, right? So... 100%. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so...

So RCHO, I was only able to go one day because it was during Halloween. So I only went for Saturday, but it was fun. Like it was a blast. Like I got there like 930 and I didn't leave to, I like, you know, I had a hotel so I could crash. But I went from 9 a.m. or 930 a.m. to I think around 230, three o'clock. And, and that was after the one hour fallback time. So like, yeah, like I think I left at like two 30. So it was like three 30 in the morning.

And for a Saturday night, that's actually pretty late because I don't know. I think the trend is, you know, Saturday is the night that most people leave, you know, so it's usually not popping like that, you know. People are out flying and doing a bunch of stuff. But yeah, Saturday was fun. Oh, sorry. No, no, no. Go ahead. I want to see something after you're done about Saturday nights. Yeah. So Saturday was fun. The two main things that...

That stood out for me was first was the 200 size of micro heli full contact combat. So it was eight of us and ranging from. M2 V3 Pros, several of those brand new ones to S2 Goose Keys, as well as a couple of M1s and S1s. Eight of them in total flying like crazy. You know, the memorable moments for me was the first heli that got taken out was taken out by Archie the dog.

And then the most memorable moment was I survived and won it. Really? Wow. And with the last two being Tanner and Lou, Missouri. doing a fantastic mid-air, like hardcore smack, like... pow like you know real hard smack in midair like cheering off you know the head off one heli chopping the boom and you know landing gears off another kind of deal

But just the sound of two helis mid-airing, that crunch noise in the air. Oh, man. So while I'm trying to not crash, while I'm trying to 3D and hit all these other helicopters that are flying out. Yeah, it was fun. And it was fun to win it too. So I get to hold the title until the next event, I guess. Cool. Congratulations. Yes, thank you. And then...

You know, this was kind of later that night and, you know, I wasn't sure it was going to happen because, you know, the night flying was happening. The night flying was kind of dying down. And like, you know, I didn't bring any spotlights and I didn't see any spotlights out. So I was like, oh, you know, I'm like, Jay, are we going to do a fire pole? Like, is there going to be a fire, you know? I'm like, you know, he's like, are you going to fly? I'm like, I don't know, maybe.

I'm like, okay. He's like, well, then let's go get a fire. So he goes up, he gets a big gas, you know, five gallon gas can, the metal ones, comes out to the, you know, this like, I don't know. It's like a spot. In the field where like there was like a OCRT TV, like tube TV. There was like a plastic lawn chair, a wooden lawn chair. bunch of boxes like just like there wasn't a couch but you know it was more like a tv it was weird like a tv fire yeah i did notice that it was not the normal

uh, you know, uh, fire material in that fire. Like I did see the TV that I definitely noticed. Yeah. I don't know if you can tell my video, but in Tanner's video, you can hear the two pop. with the fire just going at it. It's crazy. Yeah, it was definitely different material, but a whole lot of gasoline, accelerant, with a nice trail, man. That trail back.

The trail looked pretty cool. Yes, I saw that. That was cool. So cool. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Oh, and so this was my first time doing a fire pole. You know, I've never done it before of all the years going to RCHO. But this was also the first time the fire pole was done with a tandem. So me and Rick. Was it really? Yeah. Yeah. No one's tandem. They've always done like single flights, you know, like Scott Graham ago and then someone else ago. Never a tandem. And so this was the first tandem.

Interesting. I thought I had seen a tandem video before of the fire, but I guess not. Okay. Yeah, Rick got a little behind the fire and doing his pirouetting stuff, and he ended up crashing out pretty early on. Yeah, I saw that. yeah and then i did you know i did probably another two minutes two and a half minutes or so flying and like you just about hit there a few times too there was there's times i hit there there's times i crashed there's times it came right in my face and they're like

keep it out of our face, you know, like, okay. I'm like laughing because I'm like, oh shit, that was my face. It's very weird to fly in fire. And I call it out a bunch. I'm like, what the hell is going on? Like, the motor is bogging. Like, I would hear, like, you know, I would get in a fire and I'd be like, give a full collective audit. Like, you would bog. Really? I'm like, why the hell is it bogging? And they're like...

You have no air, like all the air, the density, you know, because it's on fire. Like the air is evaporating quickly. Just the air is very thin. So like the motor is like everything, like everything is trying to like. Pulled the heli back out of the fire, out of the thin air with all it got. So I'm bogging it over F, you know. That YG held up though. It held up. And I do have to give a shout out to Jamie Burkholder.

That morning when I got to that field, so I'll preface this, the day before I flew, don't fly before we fly, whatever. I flew the day before. I do it. And the 580 shot off on me in the air. Like, you know, I was like doing a big loop and shut off. And I'm like, oh shit, auto down, auto down. And no broken, nothing broken. You know, landed in safe. And I was like, what the fuck?

Put the heli away because I'm like, I'm going to RCHO tomorrow. So I'm like, okay, I got it in my head. I got that XT5195 I used on that 12S setup. I can put that in real quick. I'll solder that in. you know, get the bullet solder, get it all set up, and I'll be fine. I'll find a 580 tomorrow. You know, I've always had it in my head that I wanted to do a fire pole with a 580. So I was like, oh, you know.

And Jamie, you know, I was talking to John Titus and Jamie was like, oh yeah, I can help you. John's like, yeah, Jamie Burkle, he knows how to solder. So yeah, he helped me re-solder all my bullets. for the YG because I desoldered the day before. That's why I was go getting overcrowded. Wow. Because I desoldered one of the motor bullets again. So Jamie Burkholder helped me resolder all of it and this time it's held up.

So far, even in a fire. So, you know, it can definitely handle some heat. So, but yeah, that was awesome. It was fun. It was definitely an experience to do that. And it is weird. that air just being so thin and not like, I should have put like my high head speed on, like I needed more, you know, um, inertia to keep those blades going. I never would have expected that. Yeah. It's such a weird experience.

All right. I think I've spoken enough. Yeah. All right. So pass the baton to you there. Pass it to me. Sure.

So I, if you guys remember my, our last recording, I pulled a Steve and while we were recording, I bought an Evo. And of course, wouldn't you know it, literally the very next day, Canada Post goes on strike. Not nice. No, not nice. Thankfully... What ended up happening, there was a fun fly happening. So this dealer that I buy it from, he's from Fox Creek, Alberta, way up north. And there was an actual fun fly happening in Edmonton the weekend.

And a mutual friend of the owner of the shop and mine happened to be in Edmonton for that fun fly. he was able to go. They were able to bring the stuff out to Edmonton, not just my stuff too. It was actually a bunch of us from lower mainland here that from the Vancouver area, we all had ordered some stuff and got screwed over by the, by the Canada post strike.

And so fortunately he hadn't sent any of that stuff off. And so he was able to bring the stuff out to Edmonton and I actually got it within about a week because this mutual friend who... was coming out this way from edmonton already anyways was volunteered to bring everything out for us so worked out really good so yeah i got that installed onto my logo 690 which is what i had planned on

And I was very excited to go and maiden the helicopter, brought it to the field, spooled it up, realized first of all that I had... I programmed the gear ratio wrong for the governor. And so the head was actually spinning faster. Head speed was faster than what it should have been.

But one thing I have not mentioned on the podcast before with my logo is I had always had a little bit of a whine from coming from the tail. And it wasn't, it was... only happened when i really pushed it or if i bumped the head speed you know during or did an over speed or something like that i would hear a bit of a wind but i figured well i'll just you know my batteries are not in best shape anyway so i never really worried about it

Well, with the new V-Bar, the Evo definitely is, I'm going to say, more aggressive in how it holds the tail. Oh, yeah. And then with this higher head speed, because I had misprogrammed the governor or the gear ratio, literally about, I don't know, 20 seconds into the flight. The tail literally exploded on that helicopter. Oh, wow. It just, it went bang. It's called bye-bye. One blade went bye-bye. Yeah.

In fact, I still have not found it. Me and one of the other club members, we actually ended up cutting the grass later on that day. And I purposely tried to pay attention for the blade and never did find it. So I have no idea where it went. Wow. It's gone. Outer space. It's gone. Outer space. Exactly. It's, uh, it just disappeared. So yeah. So I figured, well, okay.

you know, unfortunately too, we've got a Canada post strike. So I took a whole heli home and started going through all my spare parts. And it turns out I actually had enough spare parts to put the tail back together. I'm like, yes. So I put the heli back together with all new parts again. Go to remading it in the backyard. All I wanted to do was just hover it. And I have this tail wag.

And for the next several weeks, and we'll probably get into it a little bit more into our main topic here, but for the next several weeks, I ended up fighting with a tail wag. And definitely was frustrating. Very frustrating. I will say this. I've been flying for almost 20 years and I definitely feel like I learned something this time with this whole thing.

So yeah, but I did finally get it flying just literally the weekend before we recorded here. Now, finally, I finally, we've had some miserable. Winter, unfortunately, is starting to rear its ugly head. I shouldn't say unfortunately because I actually like winter. But winter is starting to rear its head here and we are getting rain and rain and rain and rain.

and more rain and the worst part is is you'll get nice dry days while i'm at work and then saturday comes along and it's pouring rain and it's been really frustrating but Finally got a few hours of non-rain last weekend and got out. Got about five or six flights, I think, on it now. So I'm not... Don't have a whole lot of practice with the new evil. I will say this. It definitely does feel different and in a lot of ways better than the Neil.

I've always enjoyed how V-bar flies, especially on the head. I've always enjoyed that. And I've mentioned this on the podcast before. I've never really liked how the tail felt. with v-bar um before i flew v-bar i flew skookums and i still feel out of all the fly barless controllers that i have tried and i have tried a lot of them The Skookum still, in my opinion, has had one of the best tail feels and one of the most, what's the word for it? Like confidence-inspiring tail.

that I've ever flown. And now, with the new V8, it's the closest I've ever had to a Skookum feeling of a tail. I am really liking the tail so far. It's not fully tuned. I've got the tail pretty darn close now. I have almost pretty much no baubles. no wobbles or anything like that it just stops and i do notice like it is definitely more aggressive in how it holds on the tail on the helicopter

It really is. And I'm noticing that on the head too. So I'm going to have to go and probably do a little bit of stuff to try and loosen up and open up the head kind of thing a little bit. But that's, you know, with this winter weather here now and all this miserable rain, this coming Saturday I might be able to go. We'll see. The weather is looking 50-50 where I might get some showers and I might get rain.

So I probably am going to try and head to the field this Saturday, but we'll see. So anyways, it's nice to actually have it flying. You know, now that I finally had a successful flight with it, it's really, I'm actually liking the Evo. So far, I am liking the Evo. So, you're going to ask something? Awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm pretty happy.

And then there is something else that I've done, too, in the hobby that I actually haven't mentioned. So the other thing I actually did real quick, I will really quickly mention, too, we started our indoor flying out here. And so it's nice to, even though I'm not able to fly 700s, it is nice to be able to fly the indoor stuff. I actually have an old MCPX brushless that I got running again. And so I'll keep...

Running out of parts on the S1. How's the Oxy-2 flying? The Oxy-2 is still flying good. I actually haven't flown the one I got from you because I'm keeping that one for spare parts right now. It's ready. Sammy keeps telling me, hey, talk to Darren, see if he'll sell it back to you. He has two of them. I was like, no, dude, I think Darren needs to helicopter more than you and I do. I need it for parts. He lives in frozen hell and we live in sunny South Florida.

You don't need a micro. Just because you want to fly in your backyard, get an S2. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry. What's the one from RMP? Get the M2. Never the S2. So... But yeah, there is something a little different that I've been working on with Heli still. So I have mentioned before on the podcast, I have an old Schluter mini boy.

And I'm pretty sure I have mentioned it before. That's the first time you're hearing about it, so I'm calling total bullshit on it. I'm pretty sure I have mentioned it. You didn't mention it because you know we were going to pick on you about it. No, but no, I'll take that back. You had a scale before, right? You had another scale that you, okay. And my scale, I don't know. I'm kind of annoyed with the scale still. So I haven't actually done any work on the scale.

But this Schluter Mini Boy, I had an old Planker buddy of mine call me up a number of years ago, and this was probably 10, 12 years ago already. He calls me up and he says, hey, he says, I just bought a guy out of the hobby. There's this old helicopter in here. You want it? I'm like, I don't know. I don't really need any other helicopters. He says, this is an old thing. He says, I don't even know what this is. He says, can I at least stop by and show it to you? I'm like, okay.

So he comes over and shows it to me, and it's this old Schluter, and from probably mid-80s, something like that. He's like, 20 bucks and it's yours. Can you really say no to 20 bucks or something like that? This thing... has all is pretty much complete it even has the old servos these servos they're white no markings on them The output shaft is a four plus sign. No, sorry. It's a square output shaft.

Like it's not even like our typical output shafts, you know, where they have the little splines on them and whatnot. No, this thing is literally a square output shaft. Like that's how old these things are. The servo pins are male pins. rather than the female socket that we have on our modern servos oh interesting okay yeah this thing is really interesting and my

Thought was, you know what? It seems complete. Maybe I'll try and put it back in the air, but it was never high priority. Well, a couple of weeks ago, I decided, you know what? I need to go and actually go and do something with this thing. So I have been taking this thing apart and going through it. I want to actually fly this thing. I will admit it is nitro, and I'm going to have to learn how to go and...

do a nitro engine. Convert it over to an electric. You could probably fly it on 3S. You know what? I'd like to try and keep this thing as original as possible. I really would.

I think I'm going to have to put modern servos and whatnot in there. I'm going to call BS on it, because if it's a pain ass, you're never going to enjoy it. If you just want to build it to put it up on the wall, then do your thing, dude. But if it's going to be a pain ass, you're never going to enjoy it, and you're never going to want to fly it.

And this is something that I don't really plan on flying regularly anyways. This is the kind of thing I'm probably only going to fly a couple times a year. Maybe take it out and fly it once or twice at a heli event or something like that.

Because, let's face it, these old helis, most of them didn't really fly very good. I don't expect this thing to... to not fly very good in the tail to suck i fully expect it so i'm not planning on flying this thing all the time i really not i want it more as that novelty of classic helicopter

trying to just you know that that classic novelty of yeah just kind of like what guys do with an old model t car you know they may drive it every once in a while but they have it as a as a preservation thing right No, they ratted the fuck out.

They ride it out. They put a big old engine on it, some big old tires in the back, chop it all up, you know? Well, there are guys that do that, too. There's guys that do that. But, you know, I'm getting old in my age, so I want to do the classic restoration. Darren, how old are you now? 52. I just turned 52. God damn, you're old, dude. You're older than I am, and I thought I was old.

I told you, I'm the oldest one on this podcast. I know that. Holy shit. I thought you were older than me by a year or a few or something like that. Oh, no, no, no. I'm definitely older than that. So, anyways. Yeah, it's actually been kind of cool looking at this thing. Like this thing actually was designed to go without a tail gyro. This thing has a mix of mechanical mixing functions so that when you.

When the collective moves, it actually automatically mechanically adds some tail in there. Ooh, sounds like it's got some auto tail. Yeah, it's really quite cool. It'll run on a four-channel radio, and yet there is collective control on it, too. It has a mix between the throttle and collective stick on there, too. that is controlled by one single servo. Some of the engineering on this thing is really quite cool.

is it it's nowhere near as good as modern day standards but when you consider what they were trying to do back then it's actually really a neat design and i would really want would like to try and fly this thing as is as is so i do plan on putting a nitro engine and this is why one of the reasons why i want to bring this up on the podcast too There is one fairly important part that I am missing. And I don't know if you guys know anybody that does...

classic heli restoration or something like that. I'm hoping maybe one of our listeners does. JC Senko. Yeah? I should maybe get in touch with JC. If he doesn't have anything... reach out to dr ben minor see if he knows anybody oh yeah that might be yeah that might be about you that i would recommend it

I do have a couple of Nitro engines that should work with it. I might need to go and rebuild one of them, but they're ones that I think are OS 50 or something like that, so it shouldn't be difficult to get parts to rebuild it. Nice, yeah. But the one important thing that I am missing is I need the adapter plate that goes from the engine to the backside of the clutch. It's a plate that's got three pins in it that sticks up into the clutch.

This clutch doesn't bolt to the engine. It bolts to the mechanism, the gear train in the helicopter. The clutch is there and all that stuff I think is okay. I haven't actually pulled that part apart yet. Do you have a manual? Do you have a part number? I do have a manual. I did find a digital manual online. I haven't looked for a part number for it yet, no.

Yeah, I'm curious if I can find a part number and see. Because I would think that part number is probably going to vary according to what engine, whether it's an OS or YS engine or something like that, too. It depends. It actually depends on... So this is what's called the Schluter mini boy, which was actually the smaller one. Most of the guys were flying the heli boy. This is a slightly smaller. It's about the blades are about.

The blades on this thing are about a 500 size, 450 to 500 millimeter size. They are wooden blades as well. And I actually have two sets of blades for it. Well, one working set and then one that still needs to be finished and built set of blades. And the unfinished set are literally brand new. The engine that I had another friend of mine give me, I believe it's an OS-50, and this might be a little...

big for the helicopter. It's a fixed pitch heli. Well, it is and it isn't. That's the interesting thing is the blades actually do move collectively. It's not a true fixed pitch heli. Is it three? Three servos on the head or two servos on the head? So it's two servos on the head. Then it's fixed. No, it's not. Because there is a third servo that... adjustable for throttle and then what actually happens is there is a a wire that actually goes up inside the main shaft comes out the top

and actually moves the blades up and down as a collective straight up and down. So weird. It is very weird. I am blown away. I don't even know what to say. This is one of the reasons why I want to fly this thing, because it's so different and so weird. I actually want to try and fly this thing. I really do. The blades have dihedral in them. Oh my goodness. They're literally pointed up a little ways.

I'm looking at the manual and it is not one picture and I'm on the 15th page. I am going through every page and there's not one picture. It is all words on describing how to build this helicopter. It's insane. It's a really interesting... System 80. What size engine does it call for? That's just it. I've got an OS 50, I think it is, that should fit in there, but a 50 was pretty much the biggest. I think they were recommending about a 30-size engine.

Dude, because I remember, like, before they had 90s, the biggest engine, the biggest nitro motor. A 60, yeah. You used to run a 60 on, like... 60 was a 90 size, like, what's a 700? Yeah, yeah. So 60 on a 700 size machine. So dude, if you can find one of those like OS 37 or whatever, 27, that's what I would be looking for. Yeah. Well, I've got this, I've got this engine because it was given to me.

And I was told that it's a running engine, right? So this engine even has a pull start on it, which I'll probably have to remove. It doesn't look like it'll fit with the pull start on it. And that's the other thing too. The starting mechanism goes down through the clutch, but it actually has a cone on it like what you use to start airplane engines. Yeah. So you got to use that kind of a style starter for it.

So, yeah, it's really quite interesting. It is a shaft drive for the tail, but it's like a thin piano wire. Yeah, it's like a Blade 130X. Yeah, it's about that thin. yeah yeah and it's it's definitely quite an interesting system the the whole collective cyclic swash follower and all that stuff is really weird how the head is all set up. The head looks like nothing I've ever seen before.

traditional cradle style one that we not even close not even close yeah this is this is like you know this is back in the day this they didn't know i don't know what they're doing I guess they're just copying full-scale helis, I think. Well, even this, like, this is not like a full-scale heli setup, though. Like, full-scale helis don't have a wire coming up the main shaft to move the collective up and down. Um, some of them...

I don't know if they have... I know I've seen them on the tail. On the tail, maybe, yes. They actuate the... And this actually has that on the tail, too. Actually, no, I don't think it comes inside the shaft. It's one of the... Remember when... uh sab first announced the kraken and they had that reversed tail type thing where the control option was on the outside and they never did go and come out with that on the kraken but that was you know

that's what the type thing they're looking at yeah that's the way this tail is set up so the whole you know inside part of the shaft slides out in and out kind of a thing right um to go and control the tail it's it's just it's so different in so many different ways i don't even know if i'll even be able to ever fly this thing i'm still trying to decide because it's got that

mechanical tail mixing i'm trying to decide whether i should put a gyro on it or not because i don't know how well that would work together with a gyro um whether i would need whether i would need if i want to put a tail gyro on it whether i should go and somehow disable that mixing function on it i don't know how i would even do that but maybe um but

I definitely think I would like to get this thing flying. I think this is going to be kind of like my winter project. And I'm actually, I'm kind of jazzed about this. I'm kind of really looking forward to trying to get this thing. back together it's actually in really good condition the the canopy itself is broken i'm gonna have to go in but i should be able to glue that back together and other than that like the whole helicopter is actually in very good condition

And I think if there's any helicopter that would be a good candidate to get flying in, it's this. I just...

The most important thing I need right now is that adapter piece. So if any of our listeners know anybody, I'll maybe try and get a hold of JC's ankle as well. But if our listeners know of anybody that... might have something like that please let me know please get in touch with me and uh because yeah and if anybody has any you know good experience with this helicopter then i'd love to hear from them too

So, yeah. Otherwise, I've probably gone way too long on my section. But, yeah, that's what's happening with me anyways. Now you're good. Cool. Yeah.

All right. So kind of continuing with the talk about the tale. Do you want to continue talking about like what your tail set up? Sure. So how did you figure out your problem? Like what was your thing? So. I, you know, if there's something that I've learned over the years, especially with helping out newcomers and all this kind of thing too. So many times we have a tendency, especially when we're learning to.

not understand how critical it is to get the tails mechanically correct. And when I first started flying, you know, got that V8 going in the air. I end up getting, I was getting a slow wag. And it was just this constant slow wag. It would... Forward flight, hover, didn't matter. It was just this constant slow wag.

What was interesting is I thought I had everything really nice and open and easy to slide and move. It really was good. Like I've flown tails that were far stiffer and, and in worse shape than this one was. And, you know, I know in our internal chat there, Steve, you're commenting that, you know, do you feel that the logo tail is not really the best design? It's kind of an older, outdated design kind of a thing, too. Mm-hmm.

And there is probably some truth to that. But at the same time, I'm like, you know, this tale should hold, right? And I was, you know, when you see a slow wag, sometimes it's an indication. It can sometimes be an indication of your tail gain is too low.

so i did try and increase my tail gain didn't help all it did was change it to a fast leg and at one point i got i ended up having so uh so people know uh i did at one point crank the tail gain up so v8 now your tail gain can actually go up to i think it's 200 instead of 100 like the old ones did And I think I had the tail gain. I think I tried putting the tail gain up as high as 140.

And I got such a hard, fast tail wag that the belt actually popped off the helicopter. I thought I actually had torn the belt. Turns out I didn't. But it actually came right off. Be careful of that when you're playing with tailgains and whatnot too. But what... You know, I kept thinking it's got to be mechanical. It's got to be mechanical because I, you know, if you adjust the tail gains that didn't do anything and a tail gain, if, if.

And yet I thought I had everything so incredibly light and smooth because it was, it was really light and smooth. And yet it wasn't light and smooth enough. And what I eventually figured out. meccato with the tail that goes it goes radial bearing And then up on the bottom side, closest to the center. And then there's a little bit of a notch or little things in the plastic to go and keep that bearing from going in any further.

And then from there, it goes to another radial bearing. And then there's a spacer, which then goes to the thrust bearing. And then from there, there's another spacer on there. before you go on put the belt on and it was that last spacer between the thrust bearing and the bolt All it was doing was putting it just a tiny, and I'm talking a tiny amount of extra pressure. Just.

to make it just an extra tiny little bit too stiff when the blades when when the whole thing was spinning um i have seen this before where if you're it may be perfectly smooth and easy to move on the bench but as soon as you start spinning up those blades something changes and it gets tighter and the servo just starts to you know struggle and so then you start getting that wag. And this was a perfect example of that. It was dead smooth and super light on the bench. And yet, when it spooled up...

It was just a little bit too stiff that the servo was not reacting the way that the V-bar was wanting it to react. And so it was causing a wag. And it wasn't a fast wag, it was a slow wag. And when I would be doing forward flight, when I would do, you know, TikToks and all that, it was holding, but it was always wagging. And it was just, it just really emphasized for me that.

Just because it feels light on the bench doesn't mean it's mechanically perfect and correct. And it really, for me, relearned or retaught or even taught. just how important it is, we really need to make sure that the tails are set up really nicely and smoothly in every single way that we can think of to try and make it.

as perfect as possible i mean you're never going to get absolutely perfect but as perfect as reasonably possible in order to get a good performing tail you can have the best fly barless controller in the world And if you're mechanically not correct, you can still have tail wags and bounces and problems. And yeah, and so I just sort of felt like it would be a nice thing if we discussed a little bit about tails and how...

You know, how do we set them up from mechanically to electronically to whatnot? You know, I've got one thing a friend of mine a couple years ago taught me. He says, when you're setting up mechanically the tail... give it a pull but also try and put a little bit of side pressure on it when you're trying to spin everything and move everything and sometimes you'll actually find that if the thrust bearings are not quite quite right you'll get a little bit of a bind

when you put a little bit of side pressure on there. And you should not have any of that side pressure binding when you try and rotate the tail of the assembly and move it up and down and all that kind of a thing. And, yeah.

I actually also discovered that, and I think this probably happened when I cranked the tail gain up to 140, the carbon rod. You know, the Logo 690 has a carbon rod to go and control the tail. Well, I blew the, it was hard. I didn't see it at first because the carbon literally came apart, but it came apart in the long strands like that.

So when you just looked at the tail, yeah, it splintered, but it splintered not in the ends, but in the center. So when you looked at the tail normally, you didn't see it. And it wasn't until I actually pulled it off and sort of noticed, hey, wait a minute, it feels a little bit loose and floppy. And sure enough, it had actually, and it could have been in the crash. It could have been when I had the tail gain at 140. I don't know when that happened.

But definitely that wasn't going to help me either. You know, having that carbon rod where it splintered down the center and splintered in such a way that you couldn't tell unless you actually took it up, you know, tried to move it. you know and tried to bend it kind of a thing and suddenly it bent really really easy in one spot and uh yeah and it's something that's easy to

that I would say is easy to overlook. Cause I overlooked it at first until I started pulling it apart again. And I, that was, I was, I'd pulled the tail apart. I think for about the third or fourth time I tried regreasing. I tried all kinds of things. I tried different tail blades. I tried.

all kinds of things and i'm like i know this tail can hold yes maybe it's an older design and maybe that's one of the reasons why i needed to be so much pickier because i know i've flown some other tails that didn't need to be quite so picky But this one obviously does need to be picky. And I think it was a good lesson for me to go and learn that, hey, I can't be, you know, I've admitted on the show, I get pretty lazy on stuff. Repairing and fixing is not my favorite thing.

And I will very often just fly it till it crashes and then I'll fix it then. And this was a good lesson for me to say, hey, you know what? I shouldn't just be lazy on my maintenance that way either, right? and i need to make sure you know i should have gone and tried to find what was wrong with that wine many months back when i first started noticing i should have should have dug in harder i never did figure out what caused that wine because it blew up and

i just replaced the whole tail assembly but then of course i started having all these other problems right and maybe if i had actually tried to work on that wine sooner maybe i would have actually found you know never would have had this other issue in the first place So, yeah. So just some of the things that I feel like I learned and thought, you know, it'd be interesting if we chatted about it once tonight. So go for it. One of you guys, Steve or Frank, take it.

i'm talking too much okay no no it's going good it's going good you know when it comes to tell i you know i used to just set it up whatever i didn't really i try to get it close enough and you know and it just it just it worked it i didn't fly i didn't fly hard i didn't do a lot of things that i do now but not saying that i fly hard now but i fly a lot harder than i did back then and you know i've got the chance to

talked to a lot of pilots and a lot of famous pilots that really know how to put things together and i'm not going to mention this person but you know if you really want to set up a tail right you really got to make sure that the mccath that the mechanics are dead on. Like there's no amount of digital tuning that you can do to your fly wireless unit to overcome a bad mechanical tail. So you got to make sure that everything is right. Everything's aligned correctly.

everything is you make sure everything's loctited you know um i've seen some guys go to the end of actually uh sanding the inside of the ball links so they're a little smoother You know, I've never gone that far, but I could see myself doing it. I know some folks polished the tail shaft itself. Okay. So that way they can get like the...

Make sure there's no burrs or anything for the tail pitch slider to slide on. Interesting. I personally never did that, but I know there are some folks that do that. They'll take some scotch brite and spin up the tail on a drill or something to chuck it up. Yes, I've seen that too. They'll polish the shaft a little. You had to do it, didn't you? I actually have tried that. One thing that I have found that you want to be careful of though, and this is something I've noticed on my logo again.

is it can also go if you're going to do that you've got to be very careful you don't go too far because you can actually take some of the the hardness and the the outer um the outer coating i'll call it off of the shaft and then you can actually wreck it by doing that too so you really want to be careful when you do that too but yes i have done that before cool interesting interesting

Yeah, and as I was saying, now that we have, you know, the servos have gotten a lot better, you know, you can actually really set the zero on the servo. to work with the actual servo horn, you know, because, you know, unless you're willing to risk everything on one of those adjustable servo horns, you know, they're never set on the 90. They just never are.

So, you know, being a Team Potato Pilot, you know, I get to adjust it. And I love that. You know, that's just one more thing that I know it's on the money. And on the Excel, you know, you have the... The tail rod has those end caps, right? Sometimes you just don't have enough adjustment on those. So I actually had a conversation. I got to give credit to Dr. Ben Minor, you know.

crazy you know he's uh he just got he just told that he just uh signing up uh he's in another year for team futaba he's mr futaba he was telling on his post that he's been on the Futapa team since 1989. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Wow. That's longer than I've been flying. Yeah. Steve held himself, got him on the team. So, just...

For the old school guys, you'll know who I'm talking about. But he would say, it's like, Frank, you have a belted heli. You got to essentially, unless your Telstra mount is adjustable, you have to really... measure and cut your tail rod to the correct size and it blew my mind away. And ever since I did that, you know, the tail has worked significantly better.

but the biggest change for me was when i went up to the speed up tail gear like it was just crazy it got it just it made such a change that i went from flying usually flying 115s to now flying 105s and i've done this on all of my specters so and all my helicopters have built past that since then um i don't know guys and then When it comes to the tuning, I'm not the best at it, but I can get it close enough based on some settings that I've gotten from before. But I...

I know Steve will probably talk about it a little bit more because he does some more than I do and probably there. There is a great article or great post on Helifreak by, you know, arguably... One of the old school great podcasters, Justin Pucci, on Helifreak on the Mikado VVAR page. I recommend you guys to go check it out and hear him out.

Let's read that if you're looking to get some really simple, good instructions on how to put one together. How to solve one. Nice. So I guess I'll go into my little bit.

So just like you, Frank, I run a speed of pulley on my tail on all my helicopters. This is more because I like running a lower head speed. nowadays and then, you know, back in my past. So, like, for an example, my 580, a 600-size heli, I usually fly around. 1900 to 2100 as my like playable head speeds. It's funny because my 520, it's so light and so powerful that I... I actually run 2100. So I run less head speed on my 520 than I do on my 580.

And then like my 700s, I usually fly around like 1600, 1700. I don't even try to go up to 1900 these days anymore. So, yeah, I mean, so with my lower head speed, with tail authority, being one of my main concerns for lower head speed is so I run the feet up pulley. I still run the stock tail blade size and I fly for SAV so I've been flying with the S110 millimeter tail blades.

which I'm liking a lot on my 700s. The S95s on my 580s. And, you know, tailblades are tailblades. I think they're, for the most part, they all work. But the tail pulley is very important. Mechanical setup is very important. You want to make sure everything is pretty smooth. But this is where I differed from other people.

They're always, when people talk about the tail and they get the slow wag and they're always like, you got to make sure everything is butter smooth. Take it off the, you know, take. Take the grips off of the pitch slider. Feel the grips. Put the pitch slider on there and then feel the pitch slider. Then put the rod on. See, feel the rod and feel, you know, on the thing. Like kind of work your way back to like feel where is it binding.

High flight goblins. Goblins usually have a... The tail control rod is not perfectly straight. It has a bend to it. Oh, really? There's tension on the... push rod usually just a little bit um it helps with that like ghosting for vibration especially on nitros and things So, like, there's always a little bit of tension on the push rod for me. So, like, and tail servos, like Frank was saying, are so strong and fast these days, you know, that, like, a little bit of biting doesn't ever...

For me, it doesn't bother me. I don't go crazy. I don't sand down or buff down my tail shafts. If the tail... Dog bones, I call them. The dog bones that connect to the tail grips. If they're very tight, I might squeeze them a little with a pair of like, you know, needle nose pliers kind of deal. And those kind of open it up a little. It's a little trick I learned from the OMP.

uh, M7 heli that like, yeah, you can do that. But I find that for, I don't know. I'm biased because I fly SAB models pretty strictly. Um, that like, I don't, I just build it and it works fine. There is a break-in period, I think, with most tails and with most helis. Anything that's spinning that has a spindle, dampeners, I think there's a break-in.

So usually I'll say like five to 10 flights, depending on how hard you fly the tail. If you're one of those guys that hover and then like turn the tail to the left and then fly to the left and fly back around or do like a circuit. You're not pushing the tail at all. So like your breaking period is going to be a lot more than like five to 10 flights. It might be 20 flights because you're just not.

wearing in the tail fast enough. Yeah. If you're the kind of pilot that's pirouetting constantly, like island, just constantly pirouette, pirouette, pirouette, pirouette, pirouette, pirouette. Your tail's going to break in after a flight or two because you're just hammering that tail. You know, pushing on the tail. When you do high collective moves, your tail, you're applying more tail force because you're applying more power to the head.

You're probably more tail force, so that's going to help wear in your tail force. So things like that, depending on your flying style, will definitely affect your break-in period and when to... Go from like, is it a mechanical issue or is it like I need to now start tuning my gyro?

see and that's one of the reasons why like when you talk about you know there's a little bit of tension in there and that's one of the reasons why in some ways i think i got lazy on mine because the logo obviously you got you it's got to be that as smooth as what you know, it's like, it's the opposite that way. And, uh, you know, cause with my XL power, I say my, my XL power was.

no better than how the logo was and when and yet the xl power doesn't have that wag you know my specter doesn't have that wag at all Say it again one more time. Say it again one more time. Yeah, with that same amount of, you know, what I felt was fairly good. And so this is one of the reasons why, too, I think, you know.

helicopter you're probably right would you know when we were talking about in our backs you know uh off air chats that maybe the logo design isn't as good as some of the modern ones it's maybe quite possible yeah um i mean it could just be overall like i mean in my opinion the logo design works but yeah it's an old design too right like that heli has been around for a long time it's plastic right and i think anything that's made out of plastic has some flex to it

Yes, but I don't mind that. See, to me, the flex, because I've flown some really sloppy tails, especially on the Alarion, right? They had a really sloppy tail on them. Hey, you're saying you've had some sloppy tail? I am saying I've flown some sloppy tail. So you've had some sloppy tail, okay. And yet I never had tail wag issues. I never had tail bobbles, never had anything weird. It just, the tail held perfectly. No matter what. Yeah, but those tails were made out of metal, weren't they?

They were, but I would say there probably was more flex in those things in some of that stuff than there was in these plastic tails. I mean, this flex, we probably can't even see it. Yes. We can't feel it. We can't like tweak the tail, like push on the tail and really feel it because the flex is everywhere in the plastic, right? So you got, you got a plastic ball link going to, you know, this, this, um, to a ball, but like.

But then it's going to a grip that's plastic. That's, you know, so like every little bit of the plastic train can be flexing, right? Like just a little bit enough to then at the end of the day, it's flexing enough in the air that you can actually see a small. shake or something i don't know you know this could be all this could be all bullshit like i you know this is just my what i

We're talking about our own anecdotal experiences, right? Yes, please. This is nothing scientific. I'm not going there and measuring the tolerances of plastic and see if it... can flex or not i'm not doing nothing like that but i'm just in my opinion like anecdotally like you know when you have a lot of plastic in the the chain of parts you could have more flex so overall let me go to a pretty extreme example

Yes. Do you remember the old Hobby King crappy helicopters? Like the HK series? Yes. The HK-450s and 550s? Yeah. Yes. But they're all cloned off of the old T-Rex, right? They were. but they were terrible quality build quality. Yeah. And I remember guys that were flying HK helicopters that were saying, I'd rather have aluminum over plastic any day. And they won't, you know, and yet they were constantly having.

tail issues and all kinds of issues with those helicopters because it was such badly designed or badly done aluminum, right? Whereas my logo with plastic heads and plastic tail blade grips flew a lot better. You know, so you can get crap with aluminum. You really can get really, and you could, you know, unless you start, and I'm talking an extreme example. I am talking a really extreme example here, but. i've said for a long time well-designed plastic is still going to fly really well

I think we have an unfair bias against plastic. I really do. Yeah, but I think you're also making two different arguments. You're doing apples and oranges because you're saying like... We have one thing that's made out of plastic but has great tolerances. And you're saying this is another thing that's made out of aluminum but has terrible tolerances.

yes that's what you're saying like this cheap stuff but i think that's one of the problems then too is i think there are some helicopters even today where the tolerance of the aluminum tolerances could be better could definitely be better sure but you know like

I don't know. I feel like most of that stuff, especially in the tail and the rotary bits, it's pretty decent these days. They're not going to get... I mean, the last helicopter I would say that had that problem... follow the same Mikado issue though too much plastic and the AK series and the steam helis they flew like crap because there's too much plastic like they flew great but like there's too much plastic to things go wrong really easily on those helis and you know

Yeah. I don't know. I still think that like, if you get, if you take an SAB tail and you take a Mikado tail and you know, the design is very similar, but you have one made out of metal and one out of plastic. I'm going to say that the SAV tail is going to be a lot more less flex in the overall from the tail servo to the tail blade, like that whole system, right? It's going to be less flex in there. When the tolerances are...

all at that A-level tolerance. I'm not talking about a knockoff company and then Mikado. Come on, we know Mikado can make a helicopter, right? Germans, they can design and make a helicopter. So we know that that's there, but I think just... know it's not regular plastic they're carbon infused plastic blah blah blah they're you know they're composite materials so they don't actually flex like regular plastic flex but yeah i just feel like when you have that much plastic in the chain

That, like, you're going to introduce a little bit more flex than if it was all metal in that chain, you know? But is it not possible that maybe some of that flex is purposely designed into it, too? It is. It is. 100% for Mikado's, I think it is. That's what gives that flying style. In which case, it isn't necessarily bad either, right? No, no. It's just different. It's just different.

I think where people think to say it's bad is when, I'm going to throw Javier on their bus because he's not here, is when people try to tune out. everything they try to tune out the the little bobble they try to tune out the little when you go from like positive negative sometimes the tail shakes a little whatever fly it who cares yeah you know like i think when people try to tune out everything to make everything like like the sim

perfect, the tail never moves, that's when you come into these problems where like, oh, this thing is too soft, or this thing doesn't work, or that thing, or this is a bad design, or just, you know, because people are like unrealistic of their goals, right, of their expectations, so.

No, I'll agree with that. I agree with that. Anyways. Anyways, we're getting a little bit off. Yeah, a little bit off. But I think this is the kind of thing that isn't a bad discussion either, right? Sure. You know, I think... We take, in some ways, I think we take for granted how good our machines work nowadays, you know. I mean, there's a reason why I have said, you know, I've gotten lazy on my maintenance.

and you know basically fly it till it crashes is because they're so well built and so well designed that they just keep flying well even when there's a problem right yeah like all my bearings can be shot on my heli i will fly it until like That heli rolls into the ground. And then I'm like, oh, this bearing is shot. Let me replace it. Yeah. Wallets apart. Yeah. Never wallets. Like, I'm terrible at maintenance. Yeah.

But one other thing I want to talk about the tail beyond the mechanical setup is on the electronic setup. And this is more V-bar specific. Yeah, I was going to say we should talk about electronic setup. Yeah. So one of the big things. You want to make sure you do, and like I said, this is VBAR specific because it's kind of where my experience is right now, is the endpoints. I think it's very crucial for VBAR users to get their endpoints to be the exact same.

Or if not, make them pretty much exact same. What do you mean by... V-Bar doesn't make it easy for you to... center your tail servo because like even in a setup mode it kind of like it's in center but not really like I don't know the way you center a v-bar tail for me is I go to one extreme, I set the end point. I go to the other extreme, set the end point. And then I see where those two numbers are. If one is at 100 and one is at 80, then I know I need to increase the rod length to the 80 side.

whatever side is going 80 or like increase or decrease but i need to go so that way i can increase that 80 number and decrease that 100 number and come into a balance where the number is no more than 10 points but i even go further than that If one is 95 and the other side I can only get 90, then I just set the other side to 90. So they're both at 90. Okay. Or both at 100 or both at 80. Even if you can get 95.

Yes, even if I could get 95 on one side and I could get 90 on the other and I'm like, oh, I'm so close. And, you know, I try to toot it, but you can never get it perfect sometimes because. You know, the rod can only turn by half turn, right? The ball can only turn by half turns or full turns, actually. So, like, you know, you can only go in and out by certain millimeters. So you can never get that perfect.

I don't care at that point. I just want to make both numbers the same. So I said it 90-90 or 95-95, whatever, where I'm not getting binding on either side, and those numbers are the same. And usually, from that alone, the tail will... be like you know perfect like i won't get like the slow wag i won't get fast like you know i won't get anything the fast wag obviously your p gate your you know you want to tune your your tail gain per model per head speed because it's head speed dependent yep

The other thing to be mindful about the tail is your gov setup or your collective pitch setup. So if you have a lot of pitch and you're logging the motor, you're going to have zero tail authority. That tail is going to whip out on you all the time.

All the time. You're going to do pitch pumps and go full negative, full positive, full negative, full positive, like hitting it. That tail's going to go. It's going to make noises all the time. It's going to kick out. We don't fly our helis like that. If you do.

you need to learn collective management because you're not supposed to fly our helis like that. So, so one of the things I've noticed is like, if your gov is set up good enough or just even a base, kind of V-bar tune, like I don't adjust the gov gates. Usually if you're,

With that, with collective management, you won't have the tail kickouts. You won't have the abrupt tail slide outs or stepping or any of that stuff because first you need to make sure you have enough gain. But if you have enough gain, the tail will hold. Tuning. Tuning detail. I don't do anything special. Before you go into tuning, can we talk a little bit about setting? Because, Frank, do you do anything special for electronic for a setup yet, too? I set my servo.

close to 190 as possible. And I make sure that I get the endpoints as similar to Steve, you know.

Getting my closest to the highest possible and closest together as possible. I, um, on the specter, I actually sand the outside of the dog bones. So they fall by themselves. I replace dampeners on the tail often. Hmm, okay. I actually have like three different tail setups completely built that I can swap them out pretty quickly. Aren't you scared? No.

Like, it's just... What are you being scared? So one of the reasons why I wanted to name this episode All About the Tale, it's not just about, like, innuendos, but it's, you know... The way we fly our helicopters, we need to have confidence in our tail. If we don't have confidence in our tail, we don't have confidence in the helicopter. So it's all really about the tail, like the confidence you build on the tail and where that tail is.

So that way you know what orientation you are at and, you know, which way to push the stick. So, you know, I... when i when i make sure you know like i don't know it's just it's just something that like you got to make sure that like it is set up right so you're confident and and you know you're flying so anyways um no no and i see your point it's i'm not gonna say it's not valid it's just i've so far swapping the tails out i i build them at the same time so i just keep extras

I'm scared because of the Loctite. I'm scared to take that screw out. I'm scared to fucking... Put that set screw back because it's an aluminum hub and a steel set screw. You can strip out the hub. You can strip out your driver, try to get the red Loctate out. I try not to take the tail apart because I'm scared of putting it back together.

I don't do it at the field. I do it at home. I do it at home. And I have a set of MIP drivers that I only use for specific things. And that's one of them, right? Because I usually put red on the tail. Yeah, always red. That's a tip. I always use red. And put a solder gun in before you take it off. That's all if you're worried about it. Yeah, I have a little pen torch that I like to use that works excellent for that.

What else? You know, one thing I haven't done in a while, but I used to do, I used to weigh the tail blades to make sure they were really as close as possible to each other. But I haven't had to do that with the Jors. Yeah. I haven't had to do that in a long time either. Yeah. I don't. We probably should check.

So one of the things that Frank mentioned was replacing like, you know, maintenance on the tail is important, right? I mean, think about that. It's usually a five to one ratio. So if you're spending 2,000 on your head, your tail's spending 10,000 RPMs.

freaking cooking you know yeah it's cooking it up you know and those little tail blades you see them when they like flex when you like whip it to tail one way the other they flex a little and that's putting a lot of strain on those dampeners and bearings so it is good to do maintenance even though i never do

Something that, uh, so, you know, Steve, you were talking about with, or you guys are talking about trying to get, you know, a hundred to a hundred. Um, One thing I would say as a bit of a caveat to that is make sure you follow... what the fly barless manufacturer is recommending as well and that's where i think v-bar could probably be better in their instructions actually because you're right when that when the v-bar is set to as close to 100 at 100

And even on either side, I've noticed the same thing, that it performs better on the tail. Do you know there's a setting? Yeah, sorry. Back when I was flying Skookum, Skookum didn't care about that. Skookum, what they did is you programmed where it was exactly zero pitch. And then you would program either side. Yeah.

It didn't care whether it was even or not. It wanted to know what the max was and it wanted to know where zero pitch was. And then it would automatically go in new rough, you know, good rough how much pitch to put in for a regular basic hover. and it would go from there. The other one is Brain and Icon. I've got an old buddy of mine in Vancouver Island. He swears that...

With Brain and Icon, you should still be doing the old, old school method of setting your tail up in rate mode. So when you figure out roughly what your head speed is going to be... Then you turn the gyro off of heading hold and put it into rate mode and adjust the tail rod length for no drift in rate mode. Yeah, you're just adding.

You're adding that pre-comp automatically from there. And then you go in from that where you go and set up your endpoints then. And that's how the icons, in his opinion, the icons work best for the tail. So I would definitely say it's really important also to follow what the manufacturer's guidance, because I know a lot of people, especially back when Skookum was around, guys would try to set the Skookum tail up.

the same way as a lot of the other ones, and then they would complain that the tail sucked. And they weren't following the guidelines. That's the problem with V-Bar, is that they don't give you a chance to set up that zero pitch. Even the, you know, whatever couple degrees of pre-comp, mechanical pre-comp. They don't give you that setup. So when you go to setup, you're like, I want to set up the tail. So you hit left and it gives you that menu. But when you let go, it doesn't go back.

No. Like it only goes back a little. It doesn't go back to center. So that's why like you have to bounce back and forth to find your center point by making those two numbers even. I think that's the way. And that's exactly it. Yeah. That's, I think, one of the reasons why it's so important with V-Bar, to make sure that you have the even control on either side. You're never giving it, you're not telling it, like, this is center like we are for...

the collective right to trim, you know, for the head or anything else. So, so yeah, you're right. I think, you know, for the other FBLs, because they let you set that, that, you know, because they let you set that center point that they, you know, at that point they know what center is. So they don't care what. inputs you're running at after that right yeah cool because i know i remember with the align helicopters their pitch control that that 90 degree pitch piece on the on the tail box

was never actually exactly 90 degrees. It was a little bit different off 90 because when you're setting the servo to 90, then it should give you the pitch automatically. And of course, with something like the Skookum, that didn't work. You couldn't do that. You had to go and set to zero pitch to, you know. Right. So whereas for something like the Icon Brain, that kind of a thing worked actually quite well. Yeah.

What's interesting is people still do recommend adding some mechanical pre-comp sometimes when they're like, my tail's not holding, my tail's not holding. So instead of kind of like looking at the full picture, they're like, well, add some pre-comp, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and that's not necessarily the right answer. But it's not. And I don't think for like VBAR, I don't think that's the right answer. Like now, VBAR has electronic pre-comp settings. Elevator pre-comp, connected pre-comp, things like that.

combat those but yeah like try to get your mechanical setup good and then you know um we'll talk about tuning real quick yeah go to go into tuning now yeah yeah so for tuning i'm very simple with tuning because i hate tuning I have the opposite of Javier. I do not want to tune my helicopter when I fly. I got seven, usually seven to 12 packs charged up for that day. And I want to fly those. I want to have fun.

So I don't tune. I basically take the helicopter, set my desired head speeds, like say for my maiden, and then I'll just do start flying. If it starts to wag, come down. Drop it down five points on the tailgate. If it's a fast wag, right? If it doesn't fast wag and it drifts or it doesn't hold, then I turn the gains up and see if I can get it to fast wag.

If I fast wag it, turn it back down a little, and then I'm pretty much done. Like I don't adjust it. And usually I tune my high head speed, which I'd never fly. And then from there, I just go five points on each bank and tune it like that. I don't know. It's different with V8. I'm going to say this. Now, let me preface, that was all V6. I didn't even have, I didn't even got V7, really. I tried once, but, you know, one of them V6, V8.

V6, that's how I tune. V8, it's a little different. They have different control response and all these other settings and stuff. But overall, I turned control response up like crazy because someone told me to do it and it doesn't hurt to hell, so I did. And I just play with the main games.

Like, I don't do any I or D gain values. You know, I don't go in there and try to mess with the stop A or stop B or any of the other V-bar stop gain stuff that I don't understand. Like, I mean, I could read the help, but I just don't read it, I guess. Did you go and play with the auto optimizer for the tail at all? So originally I would, and sometimes I do. If it's a nice, if it's a nice, like calm day and.

I am having any like tail bobbles or something. I might turn it on for a little bit. I know some folks that fly with it on. Yeah. Have you tried it on the V8 yet? I have not. Okay. No, no, I have not. I, you know, when I put V8 on, I had a couple of batteries to fly with that and I got the head tune and the tail like, you know, from, from the fast wag.

And then after that, I kind of flew it, you know, I didn't really mess with that. So I did try the auto optimizer because I was getting a couple little minor little Bob on there. And so I did turn the auto optimizer on for the tail and it got rid of it in one flight. And it wasn't even a calm day. It was actually a slightly breezy day. And the auto optimizer actually did remove a couple little minor baubles that I saw.

Nice. It worked really good, and it did it in just one flight. Yeah. Thank you. Power of Mikado. Yeah, exactly. And that's exactly it, you know, getting into tuning like that, too. I mean, I... For me, it's more, I'll play around with the tuning for a little bit, but eventually I get bored and then just start flying, right? But I will try to initially get everything to do fairly well.

You know, I've got a buddy of mine out here who's a really good pilot, and I got to try one of his helicopters once, and I couldn't believe... He likes to go and set up, he says, he always thinks about whether or not a crowd is watching or not. What's it going to look like for when people watch? And so for him... The worst thing in the world is to have a little high-speed wag when he's doing something. He does a lot of high pirouettes and a lot of hard stuff on the tail.

And the last thing he wants is any sort of, you know, high speed tail wag of any sort. So he will actually purposely turn his gain down about five, eight points kind of thing below that, quite a bit below that. simply so that he can refuse to do that. But then at the same time, it is actually possible, and I found this out the hard way when I flew his helicopter, the tail will actually blow out. Yes. I did lose the tail. It blew out on me.

And for him, he's okay with that. Because he says he'll just go and fly out of it and just change the maneuver and hide it. I'm curious. What fly bar does he fly? He's V-bar. Yeah? Yeah. He's V-bar. V6. This is on a V6 Neal. It's interesting because I feel like most V-bars, you can get them beyond over-speeding, and even then you can get rid of that as well.

Or auto-rotation over speeds where it's like bop, bop, bop, bop at the end? Where I had it blow out on me was when I was doing TikToks, and it was actually pushing the head speed down a little bit. And I was putting too much collective in there, and so it was bogging the head a little bit. And that's where it blew out on me. And he does say, he says, yeah, if he pushes the head and it starts to bog a little bit, he does have the tail blow out. But he says he's okay with that.

This is one thing that I think I have found with V8 is I don't think a guy like him needs to worry about that anymore with V8 because V8 seems to tune a lot quicker and a lot better where... it's going to be able to go and find a nice thing to gain where you're not going to have a blowout or the tail wag kind of thing for a style that he does.

And so that's one of the things I was actually really impressed with. V8, I think, is going to have a better time with something like that. It's so interesting to hear that a pilot... rather have the tail blow up than to do the swag little. I was surprised. You know, it's usually the opposite because people rather, like, you know, it's wagging, but it's still holding versus, oh, shoot, the tail just blew out.

30 degrees and now my right cyclic is driving the heli into the ground you know yeah exactly i was thinking the same thing yeah so okay i mean that's cool to each their own let's make your hobby yours so yeah it's cool so But I do, like I said before, I'll do a little bit of tuning.

To try and get it better, but I'll get bored pretty quickly and just say, screw it, I'm just going to fly it. Same, same. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I'm not going to fly a helicopter that's not tuned because I don't have confidence in it. But yeah, there's only a certain level of like, I think that's good enough. I saw a difference. It's good enough. Let's go. Frank? Yes. What about you? As far as tuning it goes? Yeah.

I had Nick tune my V-bar once, and I've copied those settings for like three years straight. Nice. That's just the way it is. He did a bunch of stuff to it, you know. and it worked, and I haven't messed with it since. Cool. It's amazing how it all differs like that, isn't it? Yeah.

I do want to talk about V-Bar one more time and about the tail. And I did a recent video where I wanted to try what 200 rate looked like. like on the v-bar oh i never saw i saw the video i didn't actually watch it though oh yeah you gotta watch it it's pretty it's

It's pretty fast, and I get others people to comment, like, oh, this person's done it faster, or this person's done it, or this person used to turn off the tail gyro, and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yeah, I know. Oh, Duncan. Duncan used to do that. Duncan used to do it to be sex, but the difference between Duncan... is that he would turn off the tail the gains. So it would just whip at full speed.

Mine would whip at full speed, but I still have four tail gains. It would still stop and then hold, and I can pitch bump, I can pirouette, and stop, and it'll stop. It's crazy to have 200 rate. Like, it is fast. And, like, up close, you can kind of track the heli. But as soon as the heli got, like, 15, 20 feet away from me in the sky.

I couldn't tell from nose to tail because it would just go wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. It would just rotate so quick. It was like a blur, like someone taking a mirror and blinding you, turning the light in your face and off. back and forth really quick just because the thing is spinning so quick. It was insane. Trying to do any maneuvers was like...

I hit the tail and I'm like, holy crap, I just did a 720. The thing just rotated three times before I stopped. That was coming out of a maneuver where I thought I would have... less time i guess for it to whip around that quick it was weird the timing gets all weird but um yeah rasmus was showing you know some some some of that so i was like let me try and see what that is like in real in you know in for in like real life right do it yourself

And yeah, it's pretty insane. If you haven't done it, give it a try. Just, you can set one bank like that or you can just, you know, set the bank, take off, do a punch of tail whips and land or do some maneuvers and land. It is wild having a tail that fast. So that, that reminds me of something that I had years ago back when I was still learning. I had, I had gotten my first T-Rex 600. It was still fly barred at the time.

And I had a JR770, I think it was, tail gyro on that thing, which was a really good tail gyro. And I set it up. And I set it up and did the normal endpoints like we did back at that time and put it in a rate mode and got it hovering in it. And the tail was holding really, really good. I was really happy with how it was flying. And then a buddy of mine, I let a good friend of mine go and take it for a flight just to see how well I'd had the helicopter set up. And he cranks the tail over.

And that thing just starts whipping insane. And of course, I'm barely past the hovering point, right? I was doing circuits. I could do a few flips and rolls, but that was it. I didn't realize how quickly that tail would move. And this was a T-Rex 600 with a torque tube on there. Well, that tail gyro held it so well.

that when he let go, he put full rudder in there, and that thing just started whipping like mad. It surprised him, so he just quickly lets go to the tail, and that thing stops hard. It stopped so hard. that the tail actually rotated 45 degrees on the tail boom. Oh, wow. The whole tail assembly rotated, yeah, because it was a torque tube helicopter, too.

That whole tail assembly rotated 45 degrees. Wow. It actually still kind of held, and he was able to bring it in for a safe landing. But... I tell that story as a caution that if you're going to go and put your tail to a really high rate speed like that. just make sure that everything is really well bolted down and tight because you can have some really, like you say, there's a lot of force on those things when you're doing something like that. And when that thing, when that tail stops hard.

like some of our gyros do, it's quite possible that I thought I had that thing pretty tight and no, I didn't have it tight enough. That's it, you know? So just be careful if you're going to do something like that of 200.

you know, speed, torque, uh, rotation rate, then, uh, yeah, things can happen when you stop it real hard too. Or if you even just change direction immediately. I mean, I've heard of guys stripping gears just by going and or belts even just by going from hard left to hard right kind of a thing right so and i do that like i'm like whip it one way and stop it whip it the other way like you know like without stopping it actually like you know like one side bank to the other side real quick

And, yeah, it didn't blow up. So it shows you built it well. Yeah, yeah. Well, I built it well, and it's been...

It's been holding up because, like I said, I don't do maintenance. Anything else you want to bring up? We've been going a long time here. No, I think that's all there is about the tale, huh? Man, when I thought of this topic, I didn't think we'd talk nearly this much about it. I thought it would be shorter than that. This has been a good episode. Let's end it in a good way. Let's finish up. All right.

I guess, do we want to do contact info and stuff? Do we do that? I don't know. Yes, let's do it. Okay. For me, Facebook. Hit me up. Steven Yeun on the Facebook. Follow me. Follow my YouTube. I need some people on my YouTube, too. I think it's at Steve Helly. It's my YouTube. Anyways. Yeah. Come find me on Facebook. How about you, Darren? RCHeliDarren at gmail.com. And once again, I will let her say, if anybody's got some good information about that Schluter mini boy.

Please hit me up. I might even go and be a little bit harder on trying to check my Facebook messages. Darren Weens on Facebook. I hate Facebook Messenger. It's terrible. I do not actually have it installed on my phone. So I find it very, you know, yeah, it gets very frustrating, but I will try and check it if you really want to hit me up on Facebook, but I would prefer email anyways, just I find it easier. So, yeah.

Please, if you're, I'm going to appeal again, please, if you have information and know about that, especially about that adapter for the Schluter, hit me up. Let me know. Frank. Cool. Frank, Facebook, Hangout. You know where to get me. Mr. Moradieos. Still can't say my name correctly. I thought I did pretty good on that. You're getting better. You're getting better.

My new boss is having a hard time saying it, too, so it's always very funny. Because, you know, I mock him for it on the spot, so... Should I stop rolling the otters? No, no, you need to roll your otters. Morrer dieos. All right. All right. Okay. We got it. All right. Well, thanks for listening. Take care, everyone. See ya. Bye.