Mini Heli Blog

Trashed my TREX 450 Plastic Head and Ordered a Metal CopterX Head from China

A couple of weeks ago I had my first huge crash in my TREX 450. It’s a shame I don’t have it on film, since the crash was so spectacular. I was attempting a role too close to the ground, and the bird met tera firma blade first almost completely inverted. Damage to the head was total. The SA has a mostly plastic head and therefore I broke mostly every piece of it. Since I was in stunt mode, the gear was chewed up pretty badly since it took me a second to kill the motor. The main shaft was bent at almost a 100 degree angle. Amazingly the wooden blades were just fine, since the bladegrips and the rest of the head took all the impact I guess.

I priced out replacing the pieces for the head, and decided to just replace it with a full metal CopterX head. The one I ordered was only $40 shipped from China, and reading reviews on helifreak.com it seems that it’s almost as good as the Align setup (at a fraction of the cost). Having ordered R/C stuff from China in the past, I know that it can take up to 20 days to receive it, but I need that time to fly no the simulator and get this last crash out of my system. I’m also going to spend a lot of time making sure that my head is setup perfectly this time. helifreak.com has great videos by “finless bob” that show the proper way to set up the collective and pitch of the head. My SA came fully assembled, so I pretty much just put in the servos and started flying. Looking back, it seems that if I had had more negative pitch available during my role that I would have been able to pull it off. Although I really have no idea where it was.

Once I get my new head on and setup, I’ll write up a review of the CopterX head compared to my plastic Align head. I’ll also be sure to catch my next roll attempt on video.

1 Comment »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

1. hi,

   Stay away with copterx product because it have low quality materials. Better go for Align. I have copterx and Trex 450 ..So far ,y Trex 450 is the best than copterx the clone trex 450…

   Comment by rectro — November 15, 2009 #

Leave a comment