Thought i'd share some brief thoughts on my first few days of ownership of the Gaui 425 Basic.

Firstly the quality of the plastic seems very good considering the cost. Screws are a mixture of philips and hex driven and surprisingly non cheese like. This kit went together very quickly, i'm a slow builder, my Trex 500 took approx 12 hours, my Synergy 48 hours and this kit took 8 hours.

Some of the design of this model definately came from others, gear box almost a carbon copy of the Raptor tail.

Canopy for me was an issue, cutting and glueing. I appreciate this is a bargain bucket kit, but would it have been so costly to supply a preassembled canopy?

For electronics I'm using the kit straight off my deceased 500ESP, but as the motor is a 1600kV, meant I had to choose a different pinion and front gear (total cost £11ish) to give me a calculated max 2600 head speed.

The gear setup is marginally more fiddly to setup due to access but not too bad.

I haven't given the heli a good flight yet, foolishly I opted to put the 500's carbon tails on this heli which are a fair bit larger than the stock tail blades, and boy when the motor was on 100% the tail was not happy, yawing to the left and the gyro working overtime to correct.

One of the biggest surprises was how quiet this model is compared to the 500, it is noticeably quieter.

And would you believe that i've had my first crash already... the main rotor shaft managed to slip in inside the front gear which caused a loss of lift and a funky tail. Didn't quite get it down in one piece, breaking the skids (which seem to be the weak point on this kit) and a blade grip - thanks to revolutions' 30% off, meant the repair cost was £7.


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