There are so many questions that need answers when building scale helicopters. Peter Wales has allowed me to add his online book that answers a lot of the questions about scale helicopter. Peter was the 2001 Top Gun Winner and became the American National Grand Champion 2002 in scale helicopters.

If you want to see more of Peters work then go hear

Over to you Peter

When I have attended a funfly or helicopter competition I have always been surprised at the lack of any scale models and the amount of interest in any scale models I may have with me. Enthusiasts seem to walk down the flight line looking at the ranks of pod and boom machines ranging from trainers to exotic competition machines and only give them a passing interested glance. Then when they get to a scale machine they get very excited and the cameras come out and the questions flow. When Curtis Youngblood flew my giant scale BK117 at a recent funfly this year, all of the pod and boom fliers landed and a large crowd gathered to watch, yet when he and others were flying some remarkably exotic 3D routines, the level of interest was much lower. A nicely finished scale machine flown in a scale manner seems to have a special magic, and it’s certainly something I love to watch and to do.

There are one or two books around which deal exclusively with building and flying scale model helicopters, but neither of them was quite what I wanted in a book on that topic. This book is not supposed to replace or be better than them, but to complement them and perhaps fill in some of the gaps which, in my mind, the other books leave in the subject.

The first book I saw was by Mike Ellis, a well-known scale modeler in the US and one time importer of the Vario line of helicopters. His book has a strong Vario bias, but this is not unexpected as they probably have the greatest range of scale helicopters in the world and their products are of excellent quality.

The other book was by English author Sean Brown who also writes a column for Model Helicopter World, the excellent English magazine for the model helicopter enthusiast. Sean also flies a jumbo jet in his spare time and has been known to work on his helicopters in quiet moment on long haul flights. Seans book has a strong bias towards the actual scale flying of the finished model and is aimed perhaps more at the competition minded modeler than the casual Sunday flier.

Both books contain a wealth of information and shouldn’t be missed.

 

Chapter 1