No teeth!

I'm getting more confident and hence more adventurous in the way I fly my ESKY Lama model helicopter. I'm crashing it far less frequently and replacing the blades rarely now. Unfortunately this weekend I tipped it over at full power and did not pull off the throttle quickly enough and in doing so stripped a lot of teeth off the lower rotor gears.

The gearbox was covered in black plastic dust and debris - basically the brass motor gears had ground and stripped the plastic rotor gear teeth off in a fraction of a secound. Ouch!

This page has a lot of helpful info on how to repear this damage - it's quite a painstaking process and it's not a 10 minute fix. I'm now off to look for some stronger gear replacements.. ..and make sure I don't wreck the gears again like this!

ESKY Lama back in action!

By the wonders of E-commerce, my early Monday morning order of a replacement helicopter tail boom arrived today (Wednesday). Unfortunately the Royal Mail did not ring the door bell and just dumped the parcel on the door step, so goodness knows how long it had been sitting there for the World and his dog to see.

The tail boom kit from Miracle Mart included a fake engine and side buckets. The engine comprised of 10 tiny components which took me just as many minutes to assemble with some poly-cement glue. It has been a while since I did any gluing at this kind of detail; I used a match stick to help me dab the glue in the correct places, but I've come to realise my eye sight is not as good as it was since I last made Airfix kits when I was 12 years old!

So here's the assembled engine (note the tiny grill on the air intake, sweet!):


Fixing the tail boom was relatively straight forward, it just required unscrewing 4 tiny 2.5mm long screws and screwing on the new flexible replacement. Easy with the right micro screwdriver.

I did not attach the side buckets as they added just a little too much weight for my liking. Also, the instructions suggested they should be attached using double sided tape and I could imaging seeing them pop off during a bad landing and flying up through the blades causing all sorts of blade carnage.

Here's the results of my 20 minutes of work:


I then took it out for a quick late evening spin and it works well; I don't think the new parts are much heavier than the original parts, and they look better and the boom is far more resilient to bad landings. Result!

Now all I need to do is learn to fly properly!

ESKY Lama Helicopter Crash!

Bit of a minor disaster today. I took my ESKY Lama helicopter for a quick spin in the back garden and managed to slice the blades through the tail boom without causing any damage to the plastic blades! Owch! Perhaps I should have flown it indoors as there was a slight breeze that made it tricky to control the helicopter....


Well, the tail boom was rather flimsy and was in poor shape after I flew the Lama into my apple tree the other week. Below is a video of the incident for any of you who like to see my misfortune:




The good news is that after a quick Google I found the website "Pimp My Helicopter" that has flexible replacement tail boom, which I hope will be a little more resilient than the original part. They even supply a pimped-up Fly-Bar that has blue LEDs and make it look like some cars I see in Crawley :-)

Fun with my ESKY Lama Helicopter

The weekend is here and it's time to relax a little!

My brother sent me an ESKY Lama remote controlled Helicopter for my 40th birthday a few weeks ago (very generous!) and I've been a waiting for the right weather conditions to fly it outdoors. Fortunately this weekend there almost no breeze at all, so I gave it at spin in the back garden.

David, my 6 year old, got a little over excited about it all (he kind of lost the ability to speak coherently in English and then threw is chuck glider at it!)

As you can see from the video, I'm still in newbie learning mode! (Actually, just out of shot is my apple tree which I was trying to avoid..). I need to do a whole load more training on a simulator! I've already put in an order for 12 pairs of new rotor blades as my landings in the rose bushes and close encounters with the apple and pear trees have wrecked the first set(!) Fortunately they are not too expensive to replace and I'm waiting for some to be delivered by Wednesday!

Anyhow, this is my first flying radio controlled toy and dealing with 4 channels of control as a newbie is keeping my hand/eye co-ordination busy! Perhaps by the end of the Summer I will have figured out how to do something a little more impressive than take off, hover and land!

References: ESKY