Hirobo LAMA converted to electric, runs on 2 5000mah 3cell Lipo batteries, has a scale 3 blade main rotor head and tail rotor

Back in the day during the early days of rc copter flying (when crashing was the norm) i bought one of these, well the first version, i think this is a V2.

It taught me so much about the technical side as well as the flying. It’s a 400 size cheap and cheerful, as the decent Align 450’s where not cheap. The little Pred flew flawlessly (for a beginner anyway) until I (in a very short time) put it into the ground, and not in a good way.

Quite light and agile little copters they where but also easy to brake, unfortunately you can’t buy them anymore, I found this one on Ebay and just had to have it, just for the memory’s if nothing else.

An unfortunate incident caused a Rex500 to plummet to the ground form about 35 feet up, the damage was surprisingly low considering, the main frame at the front took the brunt of it, the main blades, 1 cyclic servo and the battery all coped it. whilst this list is small the cost to replace the parts is still quite high, so i decided to go down the clone route.

i went with the Chinese GTB clone, its a complete air frame including tail blades (no mains) and complete head, for less that 150 quid, one of the main reasons for this is that i firmly believe that the crash was caused by the DFC head failing, in that the connecting rods have very little thread and came apart, on inspection, the wrecked copter had both rods detached from the swash.

all things considered the GTB frame is reasonable quality, the carbon stands at 2mm thick and the hard plastic moldings are also good, its a belt drive system to the tail and all the parts go together well with good tension to the belt. i got 3 full size budget servos to replace the damaged cyclic one as this is the standard size on the GTB frame. i had to make some collars for the servos for both spacing and to clamp them in.

The head is not bad quality, its a standard FBL setup that comes with the connecting rods, 2 are the same length, but the configuration of the servos means that one needs to be shorter than the other and you cant just wind the ends in, so i had to get a shorter rod to make it work.

another issue i had was that the swash guide and canopy mounts didn’t work with the size of the servo, in the end i had to drill out the holes and use a single length of carbon rod and some silicon tube to replace the too short original ones.

The tail also had a slight issue with the amount of movement on the shaft, i had to put a piece of silicone tube at the end to stop it over extending and locking the rotor.

Although i have not yet flown this model properly, i have test hovered it and it did good, no real vibration and no worrying noises, the servos are not particular fast (again budget replacements) so no super 3D stuff will be happening, but it felt quit planted and stable.

Todays modern technology allows the size of RC Helicopters to be reduced without loosing a great deal of performance, this is demonstrated excellently with the OMP range of helicopters in this category.

shown here is the OMP M2 with a 3D printed canopy.

This is an amazing little Heli, its extremely capable and quite robust, this one has seen many a bump (some quite hard) and it tends to survive well, parts are in expensive and easy to change too. i would recommend one of these for a beginner to learn on without a doubt.

This is a T-rex 500 encased in a quite rare Wessex body, and its got the scale type 4 blade main rotor and tail blades, it runs on a 6cell 3300mah Lipo battery with a Micro Beast controller. i have re painted it from Yellow to the blue and red and enhanced its appearance from before, i have made and added new windows and cockpit windows, i have also improved the shape of the nose so it fits together a bit better.

on a whole it a nice looking copter with a great air presents, not something you see often nowadays either.

To RCHeli.uk