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Vintage RC Helicopters - Italy
Mantua cobra Made in Italy in the late 70's (possibly early 80's) by Mantua who were to be better known for scale ARF airplanes etc.
Very Schlüter Cobra like in looks, had fixed pitch main rotor and mechanics used motorcycle parts for the reduction gears plus speedo wire drive for the tail rotor; interesting concept and very strong. The rotor head incorporated only 'Hiller' control being achieved by using a 'teeter' spindle with the main blades able to rotate independently but 'fixed' to the flybar for cyclic control. The flybar was quite short and so control was quite 'tame' making circuit flying not so easy. No other info held. Garbo Zenith (1980)
The Zenith was a 'clone' of the Schlüter Heli-Baby made under license in Italy and introduced Aug 1980 being marketed by Robbe and sold by Ripmax in the UK. Whilst the machine was a direct copy changes had to be made so that it DID NOT look like the Heli-Baby; as a result it came with a completely different 'non-scale' canopy and the body was coloured black. Because Garbo did not have to finance the overheads of development and new tooling they could provide the machine at a much cheaper price and as can be seen, the advertised price of a Zenith was £90 whereas the Heli-Baby was £122. However, the weak point in the Heli-Baby was the swashplate so once production had commenced, the opportunity was also taken to provide a much heavier duty item for their version and in addition the tail boom assembly was then coloured Gold.
After initial introduction it was made available with collective pitch which was also available as an upgrade for those with an earlier fixed pitch version. However, unlike the Heli-baby II it incorporated the revised Bell/Hiller 'system 80' head fitted to the Schlüter Mini-Boy. Again checkout the price £113 compared to £155 for the more basic collective head Heli-Baby. These later version both fixed and collective pitch came with the whole body coloured Gold.
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