sbalder
Senior Heliman
Location: Westland, Michigan
| I'm so glad for this post- it's like online group therapy! It's so good to know that I'm not the only one who wasted time and money before finding success!
When I was 12 I saw an RC Helicopter hanging in the entrance to My Hobby in Fair Oaks Mall. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen!!!!! I would go on to get into r/c cars and as a result landed a job at the same hobby store when I was a Sophomore in high school. I saved my minimum-wage paychecks and bought a GMP Cricket, 4-channel radio, and engine. None of us knew what a gyro was, or even why you would want a helicopter radio. In any event, and like so many in this post, I never got it off the ground! All it was good for was starting up and dropping dollar bills into the spinning rotors.
When I was a senior in High school, I was working at a discount hobby store that had a large RC focus (Doug's Hobby Shop.) We had people there who flew X-cells and Concepts and I was going to get a Concept 30 when Great Planes Distributors cut off the owner for bad debts. Most of our business shifted to Hobby Dynamics (forerunner to Horizon) and they were pushing Kalt helis with Webra engines. I again plunked down my hard-earned pennies for a helicopter and bought a Cyclone II and Webra 50. WHAT A PIG!!!!!!! At least this time I flew, and hovered, but the engine never ran right and the machine, even when trimmed by our best club flyer, flew like a cinderblock. Smelling perfume and college, it languished in my parent's basement for 7 years.
I got a wild hair in 1997 and decided to get back into things. I bought a Kyosho Nexus and Futaba 8UHFS. It flew great, was cheap to repair, and I learned a lot. The only problem was that I salvaged my old mechanical 152 gyro from the Cyclone. One of the internal springs broke and I pounded the Nexus in a blaze of pirouetting glory.
Marriage and grad school kept me out of the sport for another few years until I had some spare time and money and bought a Century Hawk and and X-Cell SE and 9zhp.
I echo the statements made in an earlier post that the hobby today is almost unrecognizable from 10 or 20 years ago. People ask what the best machine to start with is today, and it almost does not matter. Even the cheapest radio, helicopter, gyro, and engine WILL fly with minimal headache. There is a lot of support locally, in print, or online. These are the best of times for the sport, and it can only get better!
Steven Balder
AMA239343 |
It is a fixed pitch GMP Rebel. It was the GMP Crickets big brother! Ran on a OS 40 engine. Never even learned to hover with it, but went through the crash kits! Radio is an Aristo-Craft 550 PCM.
. This picture was taken on January 23, 2003
