E-flite Blade 400

[mikeyj86]

Whats up fellas, been awhile since I've been on here, had to put the hobby on the backburner while I did the whole Marine thing and all the various schools they sent me to. Anyways after 18 months of not flying anything I decided to buy a Blade 400. Pretty excited about it, my first real heli. I've been fine with hovering and simple slow circle and what not. I bought the new G4 to work on more advance manuevers, my question is about setting up the Blade. I know its supposed to come 3-D capable already but I read something about head dampening shims for faster cyclic response? This all greek to me, I'm a fixed wing guy, could you all help explain this to me, thanks.

[mikeyj86]

...bump...

[GeneR]

Ok,
Since nobody responded, I will take a stab. There are rubber O rings in the head block which support the spindle (and therefore the blades). These O rings dampen the rotor disk to main shaft interface if you will and make the helicopter less sensative to inputs of cyclic by allowing some movement between the parts.

Horizon sells shims (thin metal washers) which can be put between the blade grips and the head block O rings. This compresses the O rings more and makes the dampening less. The result is crisper cyclic response. A bag of shims is only a few dollars. If you are after crisper cyclic controls (mine was fine for everything I have tried to do) then by all means remove the grips and try a shim or two on each side. Reassemble and fly the heli and see how you like it. You can go too far though and the lack of any dampening will make the heli very hard to fly (I did this with my CP Pro).

HTH
Gene