700n Maiden (Eventually) :D

[jwatts007]

Fitted a 3rd bearing block to mine...a mate had one kicking about unused so I fitted it...what I want now is the new tail set up same as the new DFC 700.....

[trillian]

I love the way bigger helis fly. Some of my most memorable moments this year were the few times the Avro was running (now have a .91HZ fitted so hopefully it will be in the air a lot more) and my Robbe Futura and Dyna-X. That size heli just reaches a lovely balance of disc loading and mass that makes them feel like they really 'want' to fly. Plus the extra presence and visibility help... and the blade noise :-)

[p4ddy]

You know, when the time comes that i decide to go bigger a Trex 700E is a VERY strong contender at the moment. I'm liking them more all the time & they seem to be far better than what they used to be. Everyone has a logo now & I already have the 500 so a 600 kind of wouldn't make sense unless i got rid of the 500.

[p4ddy]

I was the last in school to have 14 hole DM's

Everyone wanted 8 hole when i was in the juniors, i ended up with 7.


Do you really think the FB head would hold your flying back from progressing????

[waveydavey]

Everyone wanted 8 hole when i was in the juniors, i ended up with 7.


Do you really think the FB head would hold your flying back from progressing????

In short yes! The 600 is fbl and has been for just over 2 years so going back to fb and all the little corrections would scramble my noodle I think Paddy. I just didn't feel as comfortable with it as I do the 600, not saying I couldn't learn to fly fb again but it is such a different feel that i don't think I could cope with both methods at the same time. Maybe just me and limited ability but i think half the battle with flying is confidence and I just didn't feel it with the flybar.

[trillian]

In short yes! The 600 is fbl and has been for just over 2 years so going back to fb and all the little corrections would scramble my noodle I think Paddy. I just didn't feel as comfortable with it as I do the 600, not saying I couldn't learn to fly fb again but it is such a different feel that i don't think I could cope with both methods at the same time. Maybe just me and limited ability but i think half the battle with flying is confidence and I just didn't feel it with the flybar.

I converted my Trex 500 to FBL about halfway through the year having flown it in stock FB form for a year or so previously. The original Align head was getting some slop and so it was a good candidate to put the Beast X on. First of all, the difference wasn't huge really as I had close to the feel I liked with the flybar. The difference is mainly that in working on the aero moves, it stays put where you leave it, tracks straighter through big loops and stuff and basically was a very positive thing in making the 500 more useful for working on the big air stuff. I lost some of the smoothness it had before and it hovered way better with a flybar (not that it was ever great at precise hovering due to the small size).

What I then found, since I was flying the 500 more than my other helis, is that when switching to my Raptor 50 or Beam E4 they felt much more twitchy to me and I wanted them to fly more like the FBL 500 so I dialed in a bit more expo and that has brought them closer. All my other helis are flybarred, so I have yet to fly a .90 size without a flybar and because of that the extra mass and stability of the bigger ones essentially makes up for whatever drifting they may do vs a FBL machine. I can only imagine how crazily rock solid a big heli might be FBL but all my .90s have a pretty good pedigree and are quite accurate anyway (they're setup more for FAI type flying than 3D) so for the moment I'm leaving them flybarred. But having said that I am working on a Robbe Milli electric conversion that might be killer FBL, we shall see.

Anyway, not to take the thread off on a tangent but the biggest benefit I have noticed is that FBL the heli stays right where you put it, so in the middle of a maneuver you need less correcting to keep it going where it should and that's a big help when you're learning new stuff IMHO. Then once you really have a move down it's not such a bother really if you have small corrections on a flybarred heli and I still like the smoothness of flybarred and the general feel. - Just to add, with talk of FBL eventually being allowed in F3C some guys have experimented with running both a flybar and a FBL controller, so keeping the feel of the flybar with the added correcting feature of FBL.

[waveydavey]

Doesn't the fbl controller work against the mechanical stabilisation afforded by the flybar, I didn't think they would work together

[trillian]

Doesn't the fbl controller work against the mechanical stabilisation afforded by the flybar, I didn't think they would work together

No it doesn't work against it, what happens is the FBL controller tries its best to hold the body of the heli in a given position and the flybar does the same thing but in a different way. So the inputs the FBL device makes would be like if you were doing that yourself as far as the flybar is concerned. From the FBL controller's perspective it just means it might move the servers farther to acheive the result it wants. But I don't know the details of what units have been tried or what settings etc.

Obviously you lose some of the advantages of pure FBL in that it no longer has a direct link to the blades so you don't gain any cyclic speed you're still limited by how fast the flybar can tilt (although perhaps lower flybar ratios might be workable, I don't know) but the FAI guys aren't looking for lightning fast cyclics.

[waveydavey]

So where is the advantage in combining them

[trillian]

So where is the advantage in combining them

The theory is that you get the hovering precision and feel of the flybar but in the aeros you have the extra bit of automatic small corrections the FBL controller makes. Not much in the way of details have appeared on any forums as yet though so I don't know what combinations of things have been tried and with what level of success, only that it has been done and is being experimented with.