By Andrew Liszewski
Until now if you wanted a truly miniature R/C helicopter that could be safely flown indoors you either had to be a hardcore hobbyist or someone with a decent grasp of engineering concepts and basically build your own. Like a lot of people I fall into neither of those categories.
However ThinkGeek has once again come to the rescue of the unskilled geek masses and are now offering a fully R/C miniature helicopter (with remote) for only $39.99!
Using a helicopter design we’ve mentioned before this version uses two sets of rotors that spin in opposite directions cancelling out the torque generated by each one and eliminating the need for a tail rotor to deal with it. Instead the tail rotor is actually used to tip the craft forward and backwards allowing it to then fly in either direction.
Unfortunately this item has already proven to be incredibly popular and at the moment ThinkGeek is completely sold out. But they assure us they are scrambling to find more stock.
Radio Shack carried something like this recently. I bought one for my Dad for his birthday last December.
I hope this one is better, though, because after a few hours of flying normally, it developed a vigorous shake that we haven’t solved to this day.
I got one from Thinkgeek. Already broken.
Oh well.
A friend and I picked one of these up and had the following observations:
We had to open up the transmitter to adjust the internal trims to get the thing to be marginally stable in the vertical axis (left/right rotation.) Once we had that taken care of we were able to successfully hover with a little work, but the tail rotor simply did not generate enough force even at full power to give it any appreciable forward motion. It seems to be completely overwhelmed by the forces of the two main rotors.
Very weak forward and backward thrust. Basically only up and down movement.
Me and a friend just bought these from thinkgeek. His is broke already. And mine, I can only get to spin, and go up and down. I guess helicopters are hard to fly. 🙂 I wonder if we can return the broken one?