Spacey Senior Heliman Location: Pretoria, South Africa
| Stolla,
Alot of guys are flying the MA machines in competition up here in Gauteng and they do very well indeed. Personally I thought some of the MA machines hover really well but their not amazing upstairs, the Sylphide is great all round and in fairly stock setup like the C-model comes out the box only changing the mixing arms on the seesaw to the K&S ones everyone uses can make the Sylphide one of if not the best hovering machine out there. Our jaws were oozing droole when we first saw Ito hover at the worlds last year during practise, it just sits there...no other way to describe it. And no he didn't have some magical bits on the rotorhead, we spied on him for quite a while working on finding the setup he wanted to use during the competition..he went back to pretty stock unless we missed something.
I'm not going to try and take anything away from the MA machines, I have alot of respect for them but I just wouldn't choose one myself. The quality of MA compared to JR is very similar and I don't think either is better than the other. Backup in ZA like you said however might be another story, so would spares prices. If JR for some strange reason stopped making helis one day I always say I'm switching to Kyosho. MA is not on the list for me. If Kyosho fails me I'm going to Compass.
Now the Vibe? You can't go wrong there either but stay open minded (You should regardless which model you choose though). The Vibe is a little more tricky to get it to hover really well but it does have all the right stuff upstairs except the forward speed of the Sylphides. It's a much lighter machine however which certainly plays advantage all the way, you might just want to modify it into a Sylphide canopy or Super Gracy to get it going. The Vibe like mentioned will also be a little harder to get it to pass the noise test, Curtiss had to spend some time getting this right even on the electrics he used. This not a major problem however as Vibes even in stock form competed at the worlds last year, and they competed very well.
Regarding the belt on the Sylphide, don't worry it works and works really really well!
In closing, you could consider me being biased yes. I am a JR guy and will always be, but it's not because I recieve a paycheck. It's because the machines don't dissapoint. |