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After my first Micro electric heli experience (The Century Hummingbird) I was pretty
gunshy about trying out another Micro. The Zoom was full of promise with some decent
demo video's, collective pitch, and a fairly sturdy look frame. It also had a torque tube
tail drive which increased it's appeal a bit.
This kit was said to destroy the stock brushed motor pretty quick so I went all out
and bought a Castle Creations 25 Amp brushless speed control and the HiMaxx 2025 brushless
motor for it. The Castle Creations speed control and the HiMaxx motor were the best parts
in this deal unfortunately. The heli had some problems to overcome which I will describe.
Like ANY micro there's always going to be some fiddling around to get things right. One
of the major problems I experienced was that the tail gearbox kept rotating on the tailboom
and I could not get the thing to stay on there. I glued it with epoxy and used several other
methods but it kept twisting in flight. If I wasn't fighting with the tail gearbox I was burning
up gears in the front end of the heli. The tail drive input gear would strip off the carbon fiber
tail drive shaft, I ended up gluing them on to keep that from happening, but then the problem with
the tail box would arise again. Also the tail pitch slider pin had a habbit of falling out because it
was just press fit into the tail pitch slider. A lot of people didn't find this out until after this little
pin had fallen into the grass somewhere, never to be found again.
This helicopter met it's ultimate demise when the tail box seperated from the heli in flight and
it piro'd at an extremely high rate into the ground. This broke the frame ($50!) blades and some other
parts. Considering that I could buy 2 Raptor 50 frames for that price, a repair was not going to happen.
The remnants of this heli were sold off to someone else who had one of these. I hear they sold theirs off
as well.
This kit had some real promise for it, but the exhorbitant prices for spares and some of the engineering
issues left it with a lot to be desired. As for Micro-Electrics, I have no interest in them anymore. No matter
how good they look and how fun they may look to fly I will never own another one. I've sworn off this type of heli
for good.
You can see the scale of the Zoom compared to the Raptor 60, quite a bit smaller which puts it into the
micro league for sure.
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