Darren

I started with UHU POR but have now use epoxy and some tooth picks - you know, round peg into a square hole But the good news, it flies, only one click of aileron trim and much fun. Piccies later

Well I've spent the whole evening in the garage, how can a few pieces of foam and some sticky tape take soooooo long? The plane is a Weston Hype 3D running one of their own brushless setups on a 3s1p lipo. The only issue is th emotor mount, the mount seems to be refusing to stick to the depron - left it now and hope that by the morning it'll be dry. Want to get running first thing as I'm off to visit my nephews tomorrow and want to take it with me. Oh and I'm going to have to tame the control surface throws - they're obsene

No shock flyers appeared so I have been forced to get one myself Update later

I did buy the 'carry case' as well, but it seems a bit excessive to package the kit in one too But hey, I've got a nice case to keep my spares in

So what's left ? Build a lightweight set of training legs from CF tube Dig out the bicycle clips and rubber pants and fire it up Some final points. Anyone considering building one of these small helis or any heli for that matter could do worse than going over to www.helifreak.com and looking at 'Finless Bobs Helifreak Tech Room'. He's videoed a T-Rex build as well as a number of 101 vids, such as blade balancing 101 concise and clear explanations of how to and why. I hope to have the training legs done this weekend, so stay tuned for the next installment.

And that's about it - well not quite A brushless motor and speed controller is supplied with the SE kit, just needing the connectors to be soldered up. Final placement of lipos, esc, gyro and RX needs to be considered to get the CG right and to keep the power circuit as far from the RX circuit as possible - not easy on something so small I bought a PC cable tidy kit from Mapplin that has various sizes of expanding cable braiding to allow me to do quite a tidy install without using hundreds of little cable ties. I think I'll use this again on my planes. Balance and fit the

The SE kit, not only comes fully blinged with all the nice blue anodised alloy bits but is also an eCCPM setup using the 120degree ccpm mode on your radios. For those of you who don't know what CCPM is, all three servos raise the swashplate up and down for collective picth change, but forward/backward (elevator) is achieved by both front servos going one way and the rear servo the other way. Side to side (aileron) is done by the two fron servos moving opposite but the rear staying still. The advantage is direct single linkages from servos to swashplate, the downside is more complicate

Just as you'd expect, boom and tail is next. Tail rotor is powered by a toothed belt, twisted 90degrees Raptor styleee to a pinion geared off the main gearwheel. The pre-assembled tail rotor hub just needs blades adding and bolting to the boom. Boom supports added to the main frame and the job is done - again no more than 15 minutes.

The kit is available in two colours, black or silver carbon fibre. probably would have preferred black but no one seemed to have that colour in stock. Major chunks of the kit are pre-built, upper and lower frames are already assembled and just need joining, the main shaft and rotor head is also already built. Getting a completed main frame with undercarriage and rotor head is no more than 2 dozen bolts, a bit of loctite and 15 minutes away

All this talkof helis and Jimbo doing so well has inspired me to dust off the old machines. Problem is that you need constant practice and I only get to the field a couple of times a month. Nutz and his little electric helis got me thinking that even with a small garden, I could get in hovering practice a bit more often. So during a visit to SMC I had an attack of wallet weakness and picked up a T-Rex 450 SE. At least I'd sold my Raptor 30 first Anyway, the assembly was quite quick but I've built a few helis before. The first thing you notice when you open the box is that it c

Yeah, but that's MY job .....

Any chance the cabane struts could spread? Side loads on the top wing? How about a spring holding the struts together, pulling each side sandwich like against the ply wing plate filling?

Slackers, don't you know the meaning of an honest days work OK I'm jealous, looks good Joe and personally despite looking nice, I can't be bothered with the hassle that come with spats.

Anyone can tell they are scale widgets

You need a control rod building tool, a couple of pieces of alloy with slots in them ( a bit like a blade holder - ish ). These slot over the ball end and makes the process of twisting the rods to length so much easier and no more sore fingers. typically, I've lost one of the pair of mine, but I'll bring the other one on Thursday to show you Good review, one comment is about using CA on the screws into plastic - I'm undecided if this is a good idea. I had to separate the frames on my original 30V1 but it made such a mess I ended up with new frames I know certain threadlock ea

I've heard a rumour that he's employed a bloke called Ken to manage his durability test program

Good plan, never thought of proofing first to allow it to be taken off easily. Look forward to seeing it Thurs.

Looks good but too clean, needs to be dirtied up a bit. I find the permanent ink fine markers good for panel lines and an old pencil rubbed onto some sandpaper and applied by hand is good for that well used look.

.. from spending more money. If no one posts in this section soon, I'm going to have to buy a shocky so I've something to talk about.

.... to see posts in every section. And for this reason alone (lame excuse no 1 for spending more money ) I've bought a new heli and will be starting a review soon. Someone better buy and review a shocky or I'm going to have to buy one of those as well

James, Looking good and welcome to the forum.

Build time was quick, if you had everything ready and nothing else to do I reckon you could do it in 2-3 days (15-20hrs). The repair should be fairly quick too.

A few piccies

It flies ....... Not that you expect it not to. Range check was fine, took a bit of time to get the fuel sucked up through the pipes and the idle was way too low, but once running a further range check was done with no problems. With Joe acting as wingman and Alan on camera it was time for the test flight, gentle take off with a steady climb out showed that it needed lots of right aileron - something to look at later and a click of up elevator. a few highish circuits and then a climb to test the stall, throttle to idle and more and more elevator. No drama it stayed nicely leve

Chord is 385mm and cg is 120mm, so that's just a fraction over 30%