Zhuhai - Part 2 - The Helicopters

Finding the Gongbei market was not a very easy task, mostly because it's name is not Gongbei market but The Landmark. We did get to Gongbei street though, the same place where Joyce, Almen and I had been walking around the day before, and we did find some kind of shopping mall, the the one or even the kind we were looking for. After a few calls and a lot of questions of people around us we finally find it but that was not enough, the place was a maze and dad was utterly confused; he had apparently gotten in at the first floor and the helicopter should be on the third floor, the problem was really that there were only two floors and the whole complex is an underground thing where one entrance, the one dad got in through the first time, is in a tunnel, where as the one we came through was an escalator from above ground, so it took us quite a while before we found any helicopters.

We finally did find helicopters, even though it was not the same store as Kaj had seen before, and after a lot of bargaining Kaj bought three of them for 1200 yuan (400 yuan each for those of you who might have problems with math), they did not have any extra rotor blades though so we would have to find that somewhere else. And that issued another problem, going up to a store with three brand new helicopters and just wanting to buy the rotors might cause some problems, besides, dad didn't have enough space in his tiny suitcase for the extra luggage we had just bought, so he basically needed a new suitcase, again...

The bartering for the suitcase was fun, he started at around 350 yuan I think and after a lot of ups and down, with me almost speaking Chinese, we gave up at 220 yuan and left, he looked like he was about to cry when he came after us and offered 200 yuan, which was our limit so we got it. Packing down the helicopters we soon found another place where we could buy ten sets of rotors extra, so now with the including set and the one already mounted we had 16 sets of rotors to break between three helicopters. And I tell you one thing, it really is necessary!

On Saturday evening after we had left off Ariel and Janice at the Macao border we went back to Kaj's room and while he was writing emails and checking Internet stuff I started my first airtime with my helicopter, in about an hours time I had managed to get some real fly-time and of course already broken 3 rotors, all from the lower set. It was really fun though but flying in the bed made some stability complications, the helicopter basically has to start off from level ground, but crashing wasn't so bad since it was soft.

Once home I was rather eager to try out the helicopter too, but I didn't have much time and I really needed to clean up my place first, so not until Tuesday night when I had dinner with Jane first and then got back here to play I finally got to try it out. I played around a little first and had some minor crashes, no biggies, and then I let Jane try it out; it went quite well at first but then she lost control and flew it forcefully up in the ceiling and then just free fall down, crash - bang... When the noise had settled we picked up the pieces, the ones we found at least, and discovered that the damage was both less and more than we had expected, there was not really any visual damage except on the rotors and a small piece of plastic from the tail that had gotten smashed off and so far it was fine, but one of the rotors had bent around the axle in a really weird way.

I fixed it up as best as I could but I didn't have the tools to change the rotors that were broken so I just wanted to see if I could lift off with the too seriously damaged rotors, they were not broken off anywhere but the cracks in them were big and the bending had done its share to damage them too. That was one we found the real damaged; first the rotors wouldn't spin at all, then when it came around the lower set just died after a few revolutions and then it refused to start off again. After some research it seems that the front engine, the one for the lower rotor set, has been burnt out, or there could be some problem with the gyro.

Jane was feeling really bad about it and I was a bit sad, but it's not like it's unfixable, we will just take it the the toy store here and have it repaired, I doubt it will cost very much, a spare engine shouldn't cost much more than 50 yuan.

To be continued...

I will add photos and some of the videos later when I have changed them to a smaller format.