E Sky Honey Bee FP

[CrazeUK]

Hey guys i am new to the forum and Helicopters.

For a while i have had small cheap helis from ebay.

I decided to take a step and buy a small learner heli.

Through a local sales forum i found a E Sky Honey Bee.

I have just about managed to get off the ground an hover.

Does anyone have any hints and tips about this heli?

Also i have realised the plastic tail boom has a crack in it.. can i repair it or do i just need to buy a new one?

Thanks

[Chris Bott - Moderator]

Hi Craze UK, welcome to the forum.

Hopefully someone who knows about helis wil be along soon.

Cheers
Chris

[DB]

Hi Craze

I have had a Honeybee in the past and if I were you I would buy a new tail boom. Also if you have not got them get a set of trainer legs they will save you lots of money and grief. One last thing see if you can find someone who can check your heli out for airworthiness even though they are small they can cause quite a bit of damage if not correctly set up or maintained and as you say the tail boom is cracked there may be other problems. HTH.

DB

[CrazeUK]

Hi Dennis. Thanks for that.

For the moment i have put tape over the cracked tail boom.

To be honest right now i am considering selling the honey bee and going for something a bit easier like an AR Drone.

If i keep i will definitly get training legs.

I saw the heli fly at the guys house and it was fine.

No wobbles etc.

To be honest i think i accidentally cracked the tail b oom whilst trying to use it earlier \

Do you have any advice on the best way to learn

[DB]

Hi Craze

I learnt the hard and expensive way of going it alone. If I were you I would find a local Rc club who have heli instructors and do it that way. If I was starting again that is what I would do. If you look on the BMFA site you should be able to find a club near you. They will also be able to help with the dark art of setting up the infernal beast to fly correctly. Good luck in your endeavour it is a really good feeling when you get your first controlled hover and you start to move on with more difficult stages of flying. I don't think I will ever get good enough to fly inverted but enjoy hovering around and being able to fly around fairly confidently.

DB

[Anthony Billings]

Hi,

I was an owner of the good old Honey Bee V1, I have since passed it on to my son to learn with, I take it you have the newer V2 a much improved version. The hardest thing to learn with a heli is a stable hover, once you have that cracked the rest seems to follow at a natural pace. They say learning to hover a heli is like trying to balance a golf ball on top of a football while balancing the whole lot on a sheet of glass hehe well it's not that bad and there are a number of things you can do to make it easier.

First off, there are blades designed just for hovering called ezeblades, just google them, they are designed to make the hover more stable but are no good for normal flight.

The next thing is that some people try to get into a stable hover too close to the ground, and doing this puts you into what is called ground effect, which is where the dirty air forced down from the rotor blades bounces up off the floor and upsets the heli, all heli's including full size heli's suffer from this, the ground effect zone is normally twice the hight of the width of the rotor blades.

Secondly all heli's including full size will veer to the left as they take off due to the torque of the rotor, so as you increase the throttle to take off you need to add a little nudge to the right to compensate.

So to sum it up, even with a HBFP you need a fair amount of space to practise your hovers, spool up the throttle so that you can see it is nearly ready to lift off, then add a bit more to take it up to about three feet whilst controling the veer to the left.

When you first start you will find yourself going too high and then dropping down to the floor again (bunny hopping) this is normal, but after a while you will soon know how mutch throttle to add to get up out of ground effect without going too high, always practise tail in at first before you try side on.

Hope this helps

Tony

Edited By Anthony Billings on 08/08/2012 23:01:35

[ross blackwell]

Hi there crazeUK,I too have a Honey B King as yet unflown (Ihave several other helis waiting to be flown) the reason its still sitting is that most of my time is taken up with fixed wing flying at present. My first heli was a Belt CP which is now about three years old : I spent quite a bit of time skidding (to the left) across the concrete garage floor with a cheap fixed pitch heli before deciding that something more sophisticated was the way to go. My first flight at local tennis club was really good until:::::::: take-off & forward flight was easier than I had hoped , even turning.The mistake I made was because my friend had suggested "don't get too high for a start" & I was already 3mtrs. up & going gang busters; better come down a bit but whoops cut throttle too quickly & did enough damage to need some spares. I would like to see more info in print about trimming, throttle curve, gyro settings etc. I do have a web address with good advice which I will post if I can find it. by the way the reason I got myself the H B King is that I found it was the easiest model to fly on my simulator

[CrazeUK]

Hey guys the advice i have got is wonderful so far,.

Dennis: thats a good idea, i will see if i can find a club in Manchester. I know the settings terrify me. And i know every t ime i tip it up and the blades hit the ground i am probably sending the settings off kilter.

Anthoney: That is the same problem i have been having, i start to lift, then it starts tipping. I think i have mastered the art of not tipping. BUt once i get it to come off the ground, i think i get a bit twitchy and let it keel over.

I am going to try and make sure it gets off the ground to about 3 meters and see if i can just get it to hover.

Ross: yup so far it has covered most of my garden and the car park space that i am testing it on. I also read the HB is great for new learners, i have the cable to connect ut to a flight sim but my pc is out of action.

On a good note, I have just bought a AR drone off ebay, fingers crossed should arrive in a few days. But now after your advice i feel less inclined to give up the HB now.

Should i convert to Lipo? will it make it easier (through weight or power etc)

[Mark Powell 2]

Hi CrazeUK,

There is a hard way or an expensive way to learn helis. The hard way is a small electirc, like yours, the expensive way is a much larger heli, with a rotor diameter of about four feet, usually glow rather than electric. The Hirobo Shuttle is a very good one, but with engine, gyro, servos, and odds and ends you are talking of about £500, plus the radio itself, if you don't already have one. But it is by far the easier way to learn as the little helicopters are much more difficult.

You chose the hard way. That's fine. Most people do it that way since these little electric ones have become available. Probably wise too, as you may not be sure at this stage that you are really 'hooked' on helis. Persist, and you will be hooked. Good - they can be tremendously involving, giving you a real sense of achievement when you find you have moved a step forward.

One tip, though you may have already found this out. The fuselage is your 'point of reference', it does not just follow around, like it does with a fixed wing aircraft. You have to steer a heli around, like driving a car. The 'ailerons' merely make you 'slide' to the left or to the right, they don't turn the heli. Later on, faster and higher up, you will use both together. And while you are steering around with the tail rotor, watch what the nose is doing, not what the tail is doing.

Persistence, persistence, and more persistence is the key. Don't give up, it will all come together. You are doing very well - you are already three metres off the ground and you have only cracked a tail boom. And you seem to be able to hover. Excellent, and all without the training skids. Go and buy some today! You don't need to be three metres high, One metre or slightly less is enough. That will get you out of 'ground effect' where the heli is trying to fly in the air turbulence it has created. This effect goes away once you are about as high as the rotor diameter, maybe a little more.

LiPos? I am not familiar with the Honey Bee so don't know how many cells it uses. If you can get a LiPo of the same voltage (not less than the existing voltage, but no more than one volt above) you will get much longer duration for the same weight. You will also have to buy a LiPo charger, your existing (I presume NiMh) charger will blow up a LiPo.

Carry on. You are doing fine!

[James B]

I haven't had much fixed wing flying this season because of the weather and work and what-not. I've had a few co-axial helicopters and always enjoyed messing with them, so I bought myself a Esky belt cp v2 (I know! Not a beginners chopper) to mess about with in the garden when i get the odd 15 minutes here and there. I must say, its fantastic, completely different (to me anyway) to fixed wing flying. One thing I've really gotten into is the set up process, levelling the swashplate, setting the pitch of the blades, balancing them etc, it seems a lot more mechanically involved to fixed wing. I've watched loads of instructional videos and read a lot of info on flying, maintenance etc and I'm under no impression its easy or I'm going to be flying circuits straight away. I'm taking it very slowly and just getting used to the controls and characteristics of it. What I'd advise CrazeUK is have a look at a few instructional sites and get a good supplier for spares.

**LINK**

**LINK**

Some good instructional videos on here>

**LINK**

Good online shop>

last order I got took less than 24hrs to arrive!

**LINK**

[Anthony Billings]

Hi again mate, where did you get it from, as it should have come with lipo's in the first place.

If it is the V1 it will use a 7.4v lipo, if a V2 then it is a 11,2v lipo and yes you will need a lipo charger.

Tony

[CrazeUK]

HI Mark. Thanks for the vote of confidence.

James thanks for the links :D i will look through them all. Although not sure if i should be pleased at the advice of getting a good supply shop. lol

Anthoney it was bought used. In the instructions it does say it comes with Ni Mh 8.4v's.

[Barryorbik]

Hi Crazeuk, If you are serious about this hobby, I would put your HB into storage for a while and shell out some money on an MCP-x and a Spektrum Tx for example a DX6i, DX7s or DX8. The MCP-x will take the inevitable training knocks with minimal damage and a decent Spektrum Tx will allow you to trim and tame the heli to your needs and allows you buy and fly all sizes of the Blade BNF helicopters as you progress.

Only when you are reasonably competant with the MCP-x would I suggest going onto the larger heli's or the HB, as heli's are hard enough to set up and fly without the added complexity of having to spend loads of time and money fixing them after a crash.

I started with a HB King 2 and it took me nearly 6 months of hard practice and was a near vertical and costly learning curve before I managed to get to the controlled hovering stage, despite having spent many long (and boring) hours practicing on the Phoenix flight simulator.

My experience with training legs of sub 450 class heli's was not good either because of the added weight and yo yo effects. I find it better to just fit a larger skid set (normally off the next sized up Trex) to give a wider and hence more stable stance and more ground clearance.

The good news is its easy to pick up a good S/H DX6i with a S/H MCP-x (often with the CNC swash plate and tail boom mods already fitted) for less than £150.00 now, as both have recently been superceeded.

Barry

[CrazeUK]

Hi Barry.

Thanks for your response. I wouldnt say i have huge amounts of time, or money to that fact to get really into a hobby. I like "faffing" around with things, sometimes modding them and sometimes if not too costly repairing them.

To be honest the HB was an impulse buy It is definitly a learning curve for me.

My problem usually is that i dont like hobbies to be too costly until i get into them, at which point i will throw my self at them. I.e. i would happily spend £1500 on a parrot or camera, but thats because i generally know i love them.

Re the training legs: i did envisage that problem.

If i actually manage to get the HB off the ground again, and hovering and moving and landing without too much hassle, i will definitly look into upgrading the TX and there after the heli it self.

I am hoping i havent shot the helicopter hobby in my foot, i have just bought a used AR Drone, i am so excitedly eagerly awaiting its arrival that i have cursed Royal Mail all day because i cant now collect it till Thursday.

[Barryorbik]

Hi CrazeUK , I had a go with a friends Parrot drone recently but quickly became bored with it, which never seems to happen with any collective pitch helicopter, as you need 110% concentration all the time you are flying one. It is a very steep learning curve but I think that if the MCP-x had been available when I started out with helicopters nearly three years ago, it would have saved me a fortune in crash repairs and helped me progress quicker, however, my reconstruction and setting up skills may not have been quite so honed!!.

Even though I have a fleet of larger helicopters that I love to fly whenever the opportunity arises, I still fly the MCP-x every day, indoors if its raining and outdoors if its not blowing too much of a gale, just to keep my hand in and its far more rewarding than spending hours on the flight sim.

Have fun and enjoy your Parrot.

Barry