So, the replacement blades are just about here for the MadHawk300 FP heli. Awesome. Except, yesterday the dang thing flipped out, suddenly went to full throttle while I was getting ready to swap out the batteries.
It did the ‘Chicken Dance’ on the park bench, snapping off parts the tail rotor. Radio throttle response did not help, it idled down and was just sitting there vibrating wildly (due to broken tail rotor). Carefully reaching under I unplugged the battery.
Swapped the new battery in, got the TX and RX talking to each other… but what now? No throttle!
So, I now have two shattered main blades (replacements arriving today), broken tail rotor ($4.00 which I’d have to mail-order) and now.. neither motor is spooling up!
On the workbench this morning I checked the motors and radio. Seems the RX is no longer sending voltage signals to the motors. Great… why did it do that? Well, a good 6 channel DSM2 receives is about $35 so I checked on the price to replace this thing.
WTH?? Really? $50?!?!
Oh come on now! Worth $15, maybe. Ugh.. more parts. At this point I’m chasing my tail on this thing. It was only $100 new, and 1/2 of the price for the receiver? Might as well just buy a new one and use this for parts! Honestly, I liked the way it few, it was fun, docile and a good trainer, even if the range was HORRIBLE, which I thought maybe I’d fixed by moving the receiver further from motor.. but.. it freaked out and crashed before I could range test.
I’ve read many people doing upgrades to make the thing really reliable. Sounds interesting for certain! But.. then, why toss more good money after bad? Shouldn’t I just chalk this up to some good training and park the thing?
I mean.. for the price of the MadHawk300 I could have bought a EXI-450 AND TX/RX for about the same price!
Then I could get replacement parts locally. Now.. the above also needs:
– motor
– rotor blades
– ESC (electronic speed control)
– Li-Po battery
But it’s also easily upgradable.. with stuff like this, a full CNC rotor head and tail, plus some spare blades:
Or, as my final plan for the EXI-450 I’m waiting for, a scale rotor head:
Update: 9-June-2010 — EXI-450 is here!
And of course you can get really nice scale bodies very inexpensively for the 450’s, especially when compared to the proprietary bodies for other cheaper birds. Here is a short like from just one online retailer:
Factor in cheap proprietary electronics, motors that notoriously fail (tail motors) parts that are not available in any local store, batteries that are a strange size… and you have an exercise in frustration as soon as you run into a snag. And even if you are an expert flyer, you’ll run into a mechanical failure, or electronic failure and voila.. the questions about WTF have you done begin.
So, I’m really REALLY looking foward to the arrival of the EXI-450 kit this week. I’m really bummed that I have nothing to fly right now. 🙁 But at least with the 450 if I break something I *can* get a local replacement part!
Conclusion:
Would I buy a MadHawk300 or Walkera 180x bird again. NO!. I was warned about quality early on, and I chose to ignore that advice of one vocal expert, compared to the many voices singing it’s praises. Well, guess who was right?
Will I fix it at some point? Maybe. But certainly NOT with factory parts. I might turn it into a learning experiment to see what I *can* do with it. But… to what end? I don’t know. The $$$ is better spent on a 450 or 600 class bird instead of patching together what is not basically an expensive paper weight.
Upside, if there is one, is that the radio that came with it might be able to be used as a simulator controller with a $10 cable. 🙂 Maybe I’ll pick one up on the way to work and see what happens.