Eury
rrProfessor
Location: Ankeny, IA, USA.
| The Tiger is very similar to the Robbe Ornith and the JR Ventures. As I understand it, there was first a 30 sized version called the Future, and it was branded as a Robbe or a Hyundai depending on the market. Then the 46 sized Ornith came out, and had some issues with gearing, cooling and a few other things. Some changes were made to the design to meet the specs of different vendors, and the Tiger and Venture were born. They are not 100% interchangeable, but if you set them all on a table you can see that they are mostly the same heli with each company dictating different features. All of them are manufactured by Hyundai in Korea (I'm about 99% sure on the Venture, and 100% on the Tiger and Ornith). I think of these helis like a kit that Hyundai offers to various manufacturers, if you want a heli, they have the basic design that you can tweak and offer to your customers. Audacity made more changes to the design than the others, and as a result came out with the best of the lot, and a lot of owners of the others ended up upgrading their helis to Tiger spec.
The Pantera shares the same basic design as the Tiger, but with a lot of changes by Audacity, which is why so many parts are interchangable, and the Tiger is easily refitted with Pantera parts. Look at it as a huge evolutionary step from the Tiger, and with each step we get farther and farther away form the original Future design, and each company's iteration grows more and more different.
JR later came out with the Airskipper, which doesn't share a whole lot with the Ornith/Tiger/Venture sisters beyond head geometries and basic dimensions, it's a much higher end machine. RJX sells the Hurrican which is essentially the same heli as the Hurrican with very minor tweaks (position of the throttle servo being the biggest change, almost everything else is identical).
RJX later came out with the Xtreme, which is an evolution of the Hurrican/Airskipper design with narrower/lighter frames, and different head and tail design. Some basic components are carried over or interchangeable. The Xtreme and JR Vibe 50 are also very similar, although not to nearly the degree as the Hurrican/Airskipper twins, which suggests that the connection between RJX and JR is ongoing, or at least severed after the start of the Vibe/Xtreme design.
My theory on the RJX and JR stuff is that RJX made the Airskipper for JR in mainland China, or had a major part in it, so when they decided to produce helis under their own name, they just changed a couple of cutouts and the name. I could be wrong on that, but there were hints dropped when the RJX helis came out that they weren't new at this, and had been producing helis for a major manufacturer for some time. So, my theory is that RJX manufacturers JR's high end helis (Vigor, Vibe, Airskipper) in China (or at least major components of them), while Hyundai does the same in Korea for their low end line (Venture), as backwards as that geography might seem.
Nick Crego
Still wanted by the government, I survive as a soldier of fortune. |
