Baby gets a new pair of shoes

I have decided that now that I can actually fly my helis, and they are all up, I would revisit my CopterX 250Se. She was one of my first helis, back before I understood how challenging helis are to fly and that the smaller they are the harder they are to handle. Some of my first heli blog posts were about the CopterX 250. I remember somewhat her last flight, but a search of my blog reveals I may not have written about it. I don't think it was that crash on May 6, 2011, but it may well have been. It would be odd, because she has a new Align tail boom on her, and I wouldn't have stopped there; I would have finished her. At any rate, it has been scaveneged for its servos, including its tail gyro, its reciever, and its ESC, and the blade grips are missing.
 
So today I inspected her and have been ordering parts. I have Solar 11g digital metal gear servos for the swash, and ordered an Align DS420 for the tail. Found a good price, around $25, and it weighs less than the Hitec HS-5084 I used to have on it by half, at around 12g. Its good to save weight aft since the Tarot ZYX weighs a bit more than a standard gyro. I ordered a HURC 22a ESC. Since I will be flying all digital servos and installing a Tarot ZYX FBL system, I opted to cut out the 2A linear BEC, and purchased a 3A SBEC to replace it. And as I mentioned, I purchased a Tarot ZYX 3-axis stablization system with a Tarot 250 FBL rotor head, from cnchelicopter.com. In working on her I found that the tail servo mounts were missing (the blade grips are missing too, not sure what happened there. Its one of the reasons I decided to go FBL since I needed to buy head parts anyway), and that the tail boom support bracket doesn't fit well. This heli uses Torx screws, those star shaped ones everyone hates because they are guaranteed to strip. One did on the boom bracket, and then it snapped off when I had to use Vice Grips to remove it... so I had to order another boom bracket. I also ordered a couple of feathering shafts. I have the intact original CopterX fiberglass canopy, but I have a nice Tacon 250 canopy I will use. All of these parts have cost me about 4x the original cost of the flybarred heli!

 
These parts, other than some blades I ordered from China, should all be here when I get back from my trip next week to Meridian. I will have a couple of days before I leave for Dayton to finish her up and flight test her. I will have the swash servos in tomorrow so that will save some time. Hopefully I won't crash the helis I take to Meridian and won't have to spend time repairing them... Maybe I will just take two?
 
So in addition to my two 450 FBL helis, and one 450 FB heli, and my two 500's, on FB, one FBL, I will have this baby heli, the most challenging to fly in my fleet. I think she is a prime candidate for the FBL system which should make her much easier to fly as it will tame down the impressive twitchiness 250s a known for. I wanted something small to fly in the parking lot of my apartment in Dayton, and I just can't have a complete heli frame in my lab that I haven't built to flight readiness (that's how I ended up with Frankeheli. I had a complete 450 heli, just in various parts, so lf course I had to put one together)! Besides, the 250 nicely rounds out my heli hangar, and when I get the 600 blt, and step up to a 700 in a year or two, why then I will have a complete set!
 

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