Blade 400 owners

[JasonInAugusta]

After flying my B400 today I found a weak link.

I've never crashed my B400, never struck the ground with it, etc...and I have well over 20 flights on it.

Today I was doing some hard 180 stuff, full positive pitch, yank back on the elevator, go into inverted hover, full negative pitch and a bunch of elevator to pitch it back upright. Basically a tic-toc, but I was going 9 to 3 instead of 10 to 2.

Did this 4 or 5 times and saw a tail boom support hanging.

Due to the position of the tail boom support (it was hanging straight down, perpendicular to the tail boom) I had to get it near the ground and slowly ease the heli backwards and lose altitude to land.

If I had tried to move forward to land the tail boom support would have gotten into the tail rotor.

I inspected the heli and noticed that BOTH tail boom supports had come loose at the gear...rods came out of the ball ends.

Could have been disastrous.

I'll sand the old adhesive off the carbon rod and re-glue the rods into the ball ends, but figured I'd let you guys know of something to keep an eye on.

Take the supports off and give'm a tug test and a bit of a twist to see if they're snug. If not, break out the adhesive.

[4u2nv]

Thanks for the heads up... I've been looking into these quite a bit lately. I had a Corona before and was thinking of getting back into Helis again. How are these with a little wind. It's hard to find a totally calm day around here.

[JasonInAugusta]

I've been fine with it in 10mph winds.