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My general goal was to try to spend as little as possible (especially while I'm learning and don't know better anyhow) and to focus on flying until I knew what I was doing. I guess it is sort of a balance between overbuying and underbuying.. as I found out from my unbalanced setup (see Re: Re: vid above) being too frugal can impair the performance too much....but with any toy/hobby there it somehow seems to be some kind of strange tendency to temporarily lose my mind while browsing a store and splurge on something frivolous or flashy.. we'll see how I did.
So this is a complete cost list for all expenses related to my heli with an explanation of what each item is. This is mainly as a tool for myself so I can keep an eye on what my hobby is costing me and hopefully just the process of keeping track of this will in itself keep me from over buying (i.e. temporarily losing my mind). Also if anyone has comments on where I have overspent / underspent please let me know (i am "scrappyheli" on rcgroups, rcuniverse and runryder).. hopefully this will be a useful reference for others as well or people thinking about getting into the hobby who are wondering what it really costs. |
| Date | New Item Description | Cost | Total | Total Items "My Stuff" |
| 6/18/2007 | Used Blade CP My step dad upgraded to a TREX and gave me his old Blade CP. This CP was two years old and had lots of mods including Bell-Hiller mixing, a brushless main motor, carbon fiber blades, 2 Thunder Power 3c 1320mAh batteries, custom battery clip and modified landing gear (i.e. structs replaced with cut segments of carbon fiber rod). Also I got a some spare parts / salvage parts with it as well. | $0.00 | $0.00 | [1] Working Blade CP
[2] New parts:
[3] Salvage parts:
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| 6/18/2007 | Tail motor Main prop caught the dangling tail motor wire during a boom strike and ripped the back off of the tail motor. | $10.81 | $10.81 | |
| 6/19/2007 | 3-in-1 Unfortunately after replacing the tail motor I found out that the busted tail motor burnt out the 3-in-1 and it also had to be replaced. | $48.70 | $59.51 | |
| 6/23/2007 | Thunder power charger, balancer and D cable I got a pair of Thunder Power batteries handed down to me with the heli but did not have a charger to charge them now that they were depleted. I debated trying to figure out how to swap the main blades to the flat bottoms I had in my spare parts bag and then attempting to use the stock nimh batteries / charger.... but I wasn't sure at this point what was involved in swapping heli blades (nor did I think I had the tools to do so) so I figured it would be simpler to fly it as-is and get this charger | $111.44 | $170.95 | |
| 6/28/2007 | Spare CF Blades and main motor heatsink I happened to be by my local hobby shop and stopped in. The CF blades I had on my heli were still in working order, but I figured I would get a spare just in case and a heatsink since my main motor seemed to be running a bit hot to the touch. Update: these spare CF blades still haven't been taken out of the package as of 10/25/07 since after destroying the ones that were on the BCP.. I decided I should use wooden blades until I wasn't crashing regularly. | $36.78 | $207.73 | |
| 7/7/2007 | ClearViewRC sim software At this point I could hover tail-in through an entire battery back and read somewhere that I should probably use a sim to practice hovering from the side + nose in before attempting it for real. | $39.95 | $247.68 | |
| 7/9/2007 | Logitech Analog Gamepad Using the keyboard mode of ClearViewRC wasn't really doing it... | $32.76 | $280.44 | |
| 9/12/2007 | Tail motor I burnt out my first tail motor over a month before this and took a break from flight during that time while I was debating whether or not I wanted to keep putting money into these expensive tail motors or figure out an alternative or abandon this hobby as too expensive. Eventually I found a website that offered them for $4 each which seemed like it would be economical enough for now without having to consider / deal with brushless tail or belt-drive tail (neither of which looked easy or guaranteed doable from what I was reading online). Being a beginner.. I also didn't want to mess with too much (or dump in that kind of money) until I could fly confidently. I bought this one from my local hobby shop to tied me over until I could get the $4 motors | $10.86 | $291.30 | |
| 9/25/2007 | 10 Tail motors I got a bunch at once since my step dad happened to be in Hong Kong at the time (the bill was HK$ 320.90), but these can actually just be ordered off the web too | $41.14 | $332.44 | |
| 9/25/2007 | 3 Pairs of symmetrical wooden blades Again this was a purchase just to stock up since my step dad happened to be in Hong Kong at the time and could pick these up cheap (HK$156.00) | $20.00 | $352.44 | |
| 10/21/2007 | main gear/shaft Went with my 9 year old cousin and step dad to the flight field for the first time and was seduced by the wide open space... and went higher and further than I knew I should have (repairs included replacing main frame and training gear is no longer usable)Update: I now (10/25/07) know thanks to tutular-rc that in fact a bent main shaft can corrected so I can probably salvage my old gear/shart.. cool. | $6.48 | $358.92 | |
| 10/22/2007 | heat shrink tubing I'd been flying with a broken tail since pretty much the first day I tried to fly (when a boom strike took out my tail motor, my 3-in-1 and my tail boom). Finally it was time to get rid of all the tape holding the boom together and redo the wiring for the tail and install a salvaged tail boom from my bag of salvage parts | $4.34 | $363.26 | |
| 10/26/2007 | Tail boom snapped near main body (untapeable) Replaced with salvage tail boom |
| So at this point, 10/25/07, I've spent $363.26 total (and I got the heli for free) and still have a reasonable stock of new parts that should keep me going for a while ( 10 new tail motors, 1 new CF blades, 1 new sym wood blades) in addition to my bag of salvage parts which includes 1 main gear with bent shaft that I should be able to revive and 1 sym pair of wooden blades that just need to be taped up / balanced. |
© 2007 Steven Chow