The following parts are listed to give you a clearer view of the items that are required to complete and start flying your Pegasus helicopter. We make recommedations from our experience and list the radio set, type of servos, recommended gyro and other accessories that we do not carry. These are for referrence and can be purchased through your favorite hobby shop.

Required Items:

Strongly Recommended Items:

A couple of points on some of the items we have recommended. The dial indicator and high point balancer are not cheap but are excellent investments to make if you are getting into r/c helicopters. These are essential to minimize vibration that is generated by the engine and from our experience are the only tools that will allow you to achieve this with the necessary precision. The maximum runout of the fan hub, the fan itself and clutch has to be under 0.002" (two thousands of an inch), which have to be measured individually. Any more is commonly never actually seen with the eye, but is the leading cause of servo, switch and receiver failures, which ironically and incorrectly get blamed on the electronics. The high point balancer is used to balance the cooling fan, everything mounted on the main and tail rotor shaft. Dis-assembly is required to use the high point, but all good builders will take the time and make sure these critical components are balanced.

We have generally recommended quality servos, but we really wish modelers would invest in ball bearing and coreless servos. Digital if you prefer but remember to increase the Rx battery size to accommodate the added load of the servos. You get what you pay for in terms of servos. Standard, read (cheap) servos will appear to operate ok on the workbench but too commonly develop slop and make the helicopter harder to control on each successive flight until the helicopter becomes nearly uncontrolable. Money saved upfront will only cost you more later. There are plenty of opinions in the forum on the recommended servos and we have seen many economy servos work fine ... for a while.

Required reading before building the helicopter:

Important! The main rotor blades are pre-covered with the plastic blade root ends already installed. They cannot be flown in this condition! Using a fine marker, trace around the border of each of the 4 roots, remove the blade root and then draw another line 1/8" [3mm] inside this and carefully cut the covering material using a razor blade or sharp hobby knife. After the covering is removed, sand or score the inside surface of the plastic roots and epoxy the roots to the wood blades. Do one blade at a time, mounting each finished blade on the rotor head until the glue has cured. Failure to do this can lead to a rotor blade separating from the helicopter in flight. The blade the breaks away has enough potential enery to kill you or anyone in the vicinity and the rotor blade that remains attached will utterly destroy the helicopter, breaking things that you might have thought could not be broken.

After both are cured, we recommened mounting the blades with the rotor head to a high point balancer and verify they balance on the head. If they do not, add tracking tape until they balance to the CofG (center of gravity) on the lighter blade.

Often, we get excited about the dangers of rotor blades coming off helicopters, but seriously, we have seen upclose the resulting damage to helicopters in the past and in rare cases (not personally) people have been killed. As modelers we sometimes become tolerant to situations that are simply dangerous and we know better.