rccarguy
Senior Heliman
Location: Boston MA
| Good stuff here, and it is very true that the best equipment in the world won't make you any better at <pick an activity>, it's your personal ability that makes the difference.
BUT....
I have noticed that sometimes it makes it easier to learn something if you have decent equipment to begin with. Time spent trying to get things to work consistantly is also a learning experience but isn't for everyone, some people don't have much mechanical abilty, just a fact of life. Many would rather use the time available sharpening skills on the basic activity, in this case flying, and hopefully the machines abilities exceed their own. With most newbies almost any heli is going to exceed their abilities, it's really just a matter of how quickly they catch up and the machine becomes a limiting factor. Think Blade CX, or any of the fixed pitch machines available.
Having started with larger machines and worked my way DOWN the ladder to the 300 size heli's, I found the KING to be perfectly adequate out of the box. Starting with a barebones chassis I built mine up with things I had on the shelf as spares for other helis I already had. Problems with the tail hub and blade grips, no problem this spare Trex part fits. Need servos? Got a set of HS 65 MG in the toolbox, Gyro? Spare GY401. When the 401 was needed elsewhere the King got a new Logictech 2100.
The baseline machine worked very well, but I was already at the point where I could tell the difference between what I had and what it could be with a few tweaks. I love to tinker with machinery, always have. I've got a mini lathe and mill in the garage and I've got parts that I've made with those tools on a few motorcycles and several of my RC cars among other things. There's something very satisfying about taking a chunk of raw metal and making a working part out of it, but I have no patience for needing to reset blade tracking every other flight simply because the stock plastic head is a piece of crap that wears out faster than I can make trips to the LHS for replacement parts.
But I'm probably the exception rather than the norm when it comes to modifiying things, sometimes I do it simply for the challenge or to see if an incremental improvement will make any kind of a noticeable difference, by no means do I add bling just because I believe it's going to make me able to do something better.
Yes, I've got just about every concievable upgrade in existance on my King, and I've been able to appreciate every incremental gain, but it's been more of an academic exercise for me than anything else. On the other side of the coin, I've done no upgrades to the Raptor 30, it already had carbon fiber blades when I bought it, everything else on the machine performs as it should and doesn't require continual tinkering just to get consistant flight performance. Bottom line is, the machine simply doesn't need it and I see nothing to be gained by swapping the existing plastic parts for metal, the King2 on the other hand is a different story.
So what's the point of this rambling post? To each their own I guess, some people jump on the bling bandwagon because they think they need to, or it's the cool thing to do. Me, I upgrade things when I believe there is something to be gained by doing it. Do I always wind up seeing an improvement? No, but that's the way it goes sometimes.
I learned to fly on a Trex, I learned to crash on a Blade CP... |
These DANG kids today with thier Fancy gyros
He's a professor ya know!!
