Thoughts & Review of my new Blade SR

[redgiki]

So I picked up my new Blade SR today. Here are some initial thoughts from the first two gentle flights.

ABOUT ME

I've been flying since shortly after I turned 30 in 2004, mostly electric with some nitro thrown in here and there. Picked up my first helicopter (a Blade CX) in early 2006, then stepped up to a T-Rex 450XL HDE (still a daily driver!) in late summer of that year. Eventually got a Raptor 30, Raptor 50, and have an Audacity Pantera 50 waiting in the barn for me to finish.

Anyway, my T-Rex has quite a few metal parts that have just worn out from several years of flying. While looking at various parts sources for the head rebuild, I realized I could probably pick up a decent, whole, cloned frame & head for under $100 from various sources online (and while I'm at it, move from mCCPM to eCCPM), and that freed up a lot of my repair budget to look for a second micro heli. Checked out a bunch, but the Blade SR stood out for the brushless motor, compatibility with my DX7 (even though it comes with a throw-away transmitter), good solution to the burned-out-tail-motor issue of early CPs (coreless, direct-drive motor with sizeable heat sink), and good value for the money in a Horizon Hobby product, particularly compared to the Blade CP line.

BUYING IT

Three of my local hobby shops took delivery of several SRs on Friday, and still had them in-stock today (Monday). I called around, and my localer-than-everybody-else hobby shop offered to knock $10 off the price, so they won. The manager, Tom, chatted with me for about an hour about his inventory, and I offered my experience with various airplanes and helis that he carried, along with some suggestions of brands that I liked and would buy from his store if he carried them. I picked up several of the most critical parts to get my T-Rex 450XL HDE flying again prior to the major rebuild, and walked out of the hobby shop around $250 poorer.

MODDING IT

Other than replacing the ESC and included battery ends with Dean's Ultra Plugs, I chose to leave the bird bone-stock. I charged up the included battery, along with a couple of LiPos from my own inventory that should be decent alternative batteries, then headed out to my back acre and fired it up using the stock transmitter.

FIRST FLIGHT

For whatever reason, the included transmitter wasn't bound to the receiver. I thought this was odd, since every one of these birds was supposedly "test flown" at the factory. Regardless, the binding procedure is very straightforward and well-documented in the surprisingly-thick manual. I re-bound the receiver to the transmitter, unplugged it, removed the bind plug, and plugged the ESC (2-in-1) back in. Success! I heard the brief dulcet tones of an electric motor arming for flight, stepped back, and throttled up slowly.

Once it lifted off, I had to hold an immense amount of right rudder to keep the tail straight. Realizing something was amiss, I hit throttle hold, brought it down (it autos from 2 feet just fine, but to my surprise throttle hold kills the tail rotor instantly, too!), and checked over the heli. Suspecting I'd bumped it while the gyro was arming, I disconnected power, reconnected, and made very sure to avoid touching the heli further until the electric motor and gyro were both armed. This procedure is thoroughly documented in the manual, too.

This time, the liftoff was perfect. Having never flown a heli with a motorized tail before (belt-drive or co-axial for me!), I was initially very surprised by the noise the tail makes. Once the heli settles in, that's really most of what you hear: that little tail motor speeding up or slowing down as you fly.

I did a couple of minutes of tail-in, side-in, other side-in, nose-in to get accustomed to the bird. The tail has some wag to it. I knew what to do -- typically, lower the gain -- but decided to look through the instructions to find out if it covers that eventuality for beginning pilots, and it does! Adjusted the gain down a bit at the end of the pack, and tossed one of my old 1000mAh 3S packs in.

The change was surprising. The head speed was clearly higher with a 20C-30C pack than with the 15C pack provided by E-Flite with the Blade SR, and despite turning down the gain a bit after the first flight, the tail was still wagging quite a bit. I ran it through the hovering paces and decided to try some forward flight. Ran it up over the pasture next door, did some quick inside & outside eights, a couple of stall turns, and then tried a loop.

OK, this bird is set up with WAY less negative pitch than my T-Rex 450! It looped OK, but apparently I'm not going to climb out very quickly while inverted. Finished that flight, and then sat down to lose the shakes.

THOUGHTS

* The tail wag sorts itself out in forward flight, but I'm going to adjust the gain down a bit. Given the various C-ratings of the pack I fly, I foresee having to tweak this periodically, and without remote gain it might become irritating.
* There's an un-plugged-in servo plug hanging out in the bundle of wires underneath the gyro. Could this be the gain channel? Is it possible to use remote gain on the dial on the Tx if you simply... plug it in? Going to try this out after I feel like I have it dialed in with the stock config.
* Tracking was perfect.
* There's some substantial tail vibration at certain head speeds. I have a wonderful little powder scale that alerts me to slight variations in my blade weight, so I'm going to check the main blade weights and CGs to see if they are spot-on. The vibration isn't horrible -- and is only present on higher-C-rated packs -- so my guess is it's just something they didn't see in the test flight.
* Other than the tail wag, this helicopter is very confidence-inspiring. It handled a 5-7MPH wind out of the northwest just fine with only minor balloon and drop behavior. This wind made trimming it a bit problematic, but I only needed a few clicks of elevator (to counter, I suppose, a poorly-measured CG) each time.
* There is some drift to the tail as the battery drains. I'm not sure why, but it'll start out needing a touch of left trim, and end up needing a touch of right 5 minutes later. I'm not used to that in any of my helis; I expect them to hold their tail straight whenever commanded to do so. I could use some advice figuring out how to stop this tendency. Maybe it's the temperature and exposure to sunlight, too, as it's still quite cool in Utah this time of year and I brought the heli in from indoors to outdoors to fly it.
* I'm used to having a governed head speed. The default throttle curves in both Idle 1 and Normal mode leave something to be desired as they result in noticeably diminished responsiveness and head speed around mid-stick. I guess that's largely the fault of the transmitter because it's set up to be "mild", but it really feels like it has quite a very flat throttle curve around the middle, with most of the movement in the last 10% of the stick movement.
* The bird has a reasonable presence in the sky, but nowhere near as much as a 450-class heli. It gets really tiny, really quick if you push the nose down and the pitch forward!

I'm a sport pilot, and with several years of RC heli experience under my belt, I'm probably not the target market for this bird. But as a decent little heli that is probably capable of much more than it is set up to be from the factory, can handle wind with aplomb, and is docile enough with low enough head speed to avoid frightening people, I think it will travel with me to the flying field and on family trips on a regular basis.

Overall, after very minor tweaks that are covered in the user's manual, I think this is a very competent helicopter. E-Flite merged some of the best features of their Blade CP and Blade 400 helicopters to create the SR, and so far as a step-up second heli for those accustomed to a small coaxial or fixed-pitch single-rotor heli, I think it fits the bill.

And it's a relaxing, predictable bird with reasonable aerobatic capability for the rest of us.

[KCMike]

Outstanding write-up redgiki!

[Short114]

Wow, Thanks!!

[TonyRumore]

So...is your "powder" scale for GUN powder, or some other type of powder?

Tony Rumore
Tromix Corp

[redgiki]

Originally Posted by TonyRumore

So...is your "powder" scale for GUN powder, or some other type of powder?

Take your pick Bought it in a gun store, though...

Found out a couple more facts:

1. That spare channel hanging out does appear, in fact, to be a remote gain. So you get a full six-channel heli here if you want it. I guess they want you to stick with the factory settings by default, and the very first thing I did when I pulled the transmitter out of the box was fiddle with all the knobs, like everybody else would! So I'm gonna monkey with the remote gain tomorrow.

2. The pitch is mechanically oriented very heavily toward the positive. Will break out my micro pitch gauge tomorrow when the light is good to figure out how much, but just eyeballing it, it's quite a bit.

3. My problems with too little throttle at mid-stick (what I described as a "U-shaped throttle curve" elsewhere) were my own. Turns out you can adjust your hover throttle on the controller with the left-side knob. Gonna play with that tomorrow, too!

Even though I know it's for fairly new pilots, I want to see what I can do by making very modest adjustments -- not mods, just standard heli setup stuff -- to get it closer to flying the way I'm used to: plenty of negative, plenty of positive, but even if I crank into the corners I don't want anything binding. Wish me luck!

[9sec240]

Originally Posted by redgiki

THOUGHTS

* The tail wag sorts itself out in forward flight, but I'm going to adjust the gain down a bit. Given the various C-ratings of the pack I fly, I foresee having to tweak this periodically, and without remote gain it might become irritating.

I am not sure if tweaking will be needed. The tail speed is not directly related to head speed like it is on a belt / shaft driven heli. I have found that higher head speed helps sort out wag.

* There's an un-plugged-in servo plug hanging out in the bundle of wires underneath the gyro. Could this be the gain channel? Is it possible to use remote gain on the dial on the Tx if you simply... plug it in? Going to try this out after I feel like I have it dialed in with the stock config.

This is the remote gain plug. Install it in the "GEAR" channel of the RX and adjust with the CH5 knob.

* Tracking was perfect.

Mine was also perfect

* There's some substantial tail vibration at certain head speeds. I have a wonderful little powder scale that alerts me to slight variations in my blade weight, so I'm going to check the main blade weights and CGs to see if they are spot-on. The vibration isn't horrible -- and is only present on higher-C-rated packs -- so my guess is it's just something they didn't see in the test flight.

My blades were pretty close in balance but it still needed a square of electrical tape to sort it out.

* Other than the tail wag, this helicopter is very confidence-inspiring. It handled a 5-7MPH wind out of the northwest just fine with only minor balloon and drop behavior. This wind made trimming it a bit problematic, but I only needed a few clicks of elevator (to counter, I suppose, a poorly-measured CG) each time.

Mine handled wind pretty well. I was out flying in 12 MPH constant 23 MPH gusts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD_eIN1MU20

* There is some drift to the tail as the battery drains. I'm not sure why, but it'll start out needing a touch of left trim, and end up needing a touch of right 5 minutes later. I'm not used to that in any of my helis; I expect them to hold their tail straight whenever commanded to do so. I could use some advice figuring out how to stop this tendency. Maybe it's the temperature and exposure to sunlight, too, as it's still quite cool in Utah this time of year and I brought the heli in from indoors to outdoors to fly it.

The gyro is a pizo style gyro which is temperature sensitive. A tiny amount of drift as the battery comes down is kind of normal too. Overall it does a great job of holding the tail in place.

* I'm used to having a governed head speed. The default throttle curves in both Idle 1 and Normal mode leave something to be desired as they result in noticeably diminished responsiveness and head speed around mid-stick. I guess that's largely the fault of the transmitter because it's set up to be "mild", but it really feels like it has quite a very flat throttle curve around the middle, with most of the movement in the last 10% of the stick movement.

I would check to see if your pitch is zero at mid stick in Throttle hold. This will ensure that the pitch and throttle curves are jiving. Mine was quite a bit off. Where do you have your SM TCM ADJ knob set? All the way clockwise will put your Idle Up throttle curve at 100%.

* The bird has a reasonable presence in the sky, but nowhere near as much as a 450-class heli. It gets really tiny, really quick if you push the nose down and the pitch forward!

Yeah.. she RIPS doesn't she?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGTra8uOY4I

I'm a sport pilot, and with several years of RC heli experience under my belt, I'm probably not the target market for this bird. But as a decent little heli that is probably capable of much more than it is set up to be from the factory, can handle wind with aplomb, and is docile enough with low enough head speed to avoid frightening people, I think it will travel with me to the flying field and on family trips on a regular basis.

I agree with your summation.

Overall, after very minor tweaks that are covered in the user's manual, I think this is a very competent helicopter. E-Flite merged some of the best features of their Blade CP and Blade 400 helicopters to create the SR, and so far as a step-up second heli for those accustomed to a small coaxial or fixed-pitch single-rotor heli, I think it fits the bill.

And it's a relaxing, predictable bird with reasonable aerobatic capability for the rest of us.

Keep us updated.

[GTX_SlotCar]

Originally Posted by redgiki

...good solution to the burned-out-tail-motor issue of early CPs (coreless, direct-drive motor with sizeable heat sink)....

I'm just curious. Are you 100% certain this is a coreless tail motor. I see this repeated here and there, but the E-flite specs don't say coreless (anywhere that I can find, anyway). It seems like they'd make a big deal about it if it was.
If it is coreless, I want to buy a couple. There's probably only 2 ways to know for sure. One is to talk to someone at Horizon who know (for sure), and the other is to take one apart. That would be the best way to know. Problem is, you probably won't be able to put it back together again.
Thanks.