Vintage RC Helicopters - Joe's Collection - E-sky

Joe's Collection - E-sky  Joe William Richardson

E-sky Honeybee King 2 (2008)

In 2007 I had four 'Tyro' helicopter flyers on my ship who I started to teach how to fly helicopters.  Three of them had clubbed together and despite my initial advice had purchased a Honeybee King 2 each; complete packages for what was a very good price but unfortunately they were to learn what a mistake this would turn out to be.  The forth listened and bought a T-rex 'clone' and very quickly learned to hover... but that is another story.  After having many failures one of the three bought a Mini-titan and also I part swapped him a Shuttle for this Honeybee King 2 which is the point of the story.

Why you may ask given the above statements?  I had spent many hours trying to set up all three of their models, each was different but one common fault was that I could not get them to track correctly with all of them displaying about 30 degrees phasing on the cyclic controls.

I wasn't going to be beaten and had 'heard' that the complete 'metal' upgrade set made them fly OK so for the princely sum of £32 (inc postage from Hong Kong), I tried it.  The helicopter was stripped down, fully checked over and rebuilt with all the upgrades, plus a brushless motor.  Low and behold, after carefully setting up on the first test it 'hopped' up into the hover with good control and showing no phasing at all; even figure eights etc were controllable and quite smooth.  Following that I acquired an Airwolf fuselage for next to no money and carried out the conversion.  Looks though are not quite right as it has a very 'tall' head and with it being purple is quite noticeable.  The extra weight seemed to make it hover and control very smoothly however, the fitted brushless motor was only a '400' size replacement and thus with the body could only just provide enough power to hover.

In Mar-09 a larger brushless motor was purchased awaiting time to fit it.

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