Microheli Vortex 200 PRO Review

Written by Ashley Davis Sunday, 09 May 2010 00:00

Vortex 200 PRO

The following is a build and review of the MicroHeli Vortex 200 PRO.

This article brings together my collective experiences in both building the MicroHeli Vortex 200 PRO and flying it. Additionally I have owned, lived with, worked on and crashed the model over the past few months and my experiences of this also form part of the review.

The kits retails at £199 in the UK or $299 in the USA.

Introduction

The market for 200 or 250 class helicopters is not overflowing with model choices. In fact until the arrival of the Vortex 200 PRO it literally fell to two competing models. These being the Gaui 200 and the T-Rex 250.

I have owned and flown both of these helicopters and whilst I was really quite unimpressed with the Gaui the T-Rex 250 has been a reasonable heli. You can probably tell from that statement that it's not exactly top of my favourite list either, the tail system is weak and the supplied motor was pretty poor. Personally I upgraded my 250 with metal bearing blocks, Scorpion motor, carbon blades, CSM 720 gyro and a Castle ESC. These changes make it passable as a 3D heli but the tail system is still not that strong and the accuracy of the machine overall is pretty poor compared to larger heli's.

Given my lack of enthusiasm for the Gaui and to a lesser extent the T-Rex 250 I was not overly savouring the thought of another 200/250 class helicopter. I have an open mind on things in general so I didn't want to apply the short comings of my other 200/250 class machines to the Vortex. So doubts aside I built the Vortex 200 PRO with high hopes of a better 200/250 class experience.

You can see a video overview of the Votex 200 PRO elsewhere on the site.

Build

We produced a build video for the Vortex 200 PRO, which is fairly short as the Votex pretty much comes in three prebuilt parts. These are the frames, head and tail rotor. Assembly of the model in it's most basic form is just bolting these three pre-assembled parts together. That said I'd never been one to trust somebody else's build work and as such care should be taken to disassemble each part and apply loctite where required. The Vortex is predominantly metal and carbon construction and with this being the case nearly all the screws need loctite to secure them.

The Vortex features mostly cross or phillips headed screws. Generally I'm not keen on this type of screw for helicopters. They tend to be of cheap manufacture and are not easy to work with. I'll take hex headed bolts over this style everytime. Staying with the bolts given the cross headed nature a lot of care needs to be taken in using the correct size screwdriver for the job and not stripping the screw heads. Additionally the metals used in the Vortex are quite soft and overtightening screws is easily done with thread strips as a result.

Reservations about the bolts aside the heli builds up very easily with virtually no guess work required due to the high level of pre-assembly done to the kit as supplied. The whole assembly took me just over an hour with radio install taking significantly longer than the actual mechanical build itself.

All the parts were of adequate quality but as previously mentioned the CNC parts are made from a fairly soft aluminium and so care needs to be taken on assembly to avoid stripping threads.

Overall the build is a simple one and all the parts fitted together very nicely with no issues on my kit other than the screws for the anti-rotation slider being the wrong ones and too short as supplied. Luckily I had some longer similar screws in my spares box and these were used instead.

Servo installation is straight forward enough but as usual with 200 class helicopters not a huge amount of room exists for all the wire routing and electronics. With some care the necessary rx, servos and gyro were installed and CG tested and found to be plenty good enough for first flights. The Vortex is a 120 degree CCPM helicopter and so CCPM setup is required. Also as an added oddity on my model the swashplate goes down in order to increase pitch and up to reduce it.......weird. I checked the manual a few times on this front but all seemed to be well despite the odd reversed swashplate movement.

The Vortex comes supplied with an outrunner motor and blades but no ESC, gyro or servos. I chose to fit ino-lab micro servos, Logictech 2100 gyro and a Castle 25A ESC.

From a quality perspective I wouldn't say the Vortex is any better or worse than a T-Rex 250. Certainly you get little plastic parts with the Vortex, it is a proper carbon and CNC helicopter as opposed to the T-Rex 250 which does feature quite a few plastic parts.

Having finished the build I picked out some things that I like and also some things that I didn't like. On the negative side the swash plate ball is aluminium construction and as such it will shed material onto the steel main shaft. This means you need to apply a generous amount of lubrication to the main shaft and swash plate in order to keep it free moving. Secondly and somewhat bizarrely the main gear cannot be removed from the frames without splitting the upper and lower frames. I could not come up with any good reason why Microheli would do this as a main gear is an often replaced item and not many would savour the thought of splitting their frames each time they wanted to change a main gear.

The things that I liked are the servo arrangement around the main shaft which allows for a very easy CCPM setup. The torque tube drive for the tail appears to be very robust given its diminutive size. The battery tray is adjustable for different size batteries. The motor mount slides in the frames in order to adjust the motor mesh to the main gear. The carbon frames are very rigid and should provide a stable platform for the rotor head.

Blades

The main blades supplied with the Vortex are carbon and slightly smaller than the T-Rex 250. The tail blades are plastic and the tail grips feature chinese weighting to minimise loading on the tail servo. My machine was fitted with an ino-lab fast micro servo fo the tail.

It's important to realise that the Vortex is a smaller heli than the T-Rex 250 due to the smaller blade size BUT it's not much smaller. The carbon blades supplied are pretty stiff and should provide ample enough siffness for good 3D perfromance.

Flight Testing

Flight testing was conducted both inside and outside in order to get a good feel for the machine in perfectly calm conditions as well as with some wind. The first flights were outside and one of the problems I was experiencing was what felt like stiff ball links. This actually turned out to be the aluminium swash plate locking up on the main shaft and led to my discovery that the swash plate ball requires lubrication in order to function correctly. Once I had fixed this problem the collective pitch response was transformed and suddenly the machine felt a whole lot more controllable.

The next flight after fixing the swash plate was actually an indoor fly-in. It was during this flight that I discovered that the Vortex can actually be flown quite accurately in comparison to my T Rex 250. The collective is that little bit more crisp and the machine itself more accurate and less prone to wandering off-track. The Vortex is also very much helped by it's superb motor which has excellent power and provides plenty of punch to perform some very nice 3-D manoeuvres. Certainly continuous tick-tock's is easily attainable and whilst the power is not overwhelming it is certainly more than adequate.

One thing I was very keen to explore was how well the tail performed and I was not disappointed with what I found. The tail on the Vortex feels more capable than the T Rex 250 and this gives you more confidence to push the machine harder and trust that the tail won't blow out. I have to temper this by pointing out that the tail is by no means as good or powerful as a 450 sized model but it does the job.

The Vortex can perform chaos manoeuvres as well as pirouetting walls of death and as long as you don't push the collective and cyclic too hard the tail will behave itself. Overall it is by no means as accurate as a 450 sized model and still has some of the wayward tendencies that you get with a 250 sized model but it is more confidence inspiring and delivers better power than the T Rex 250.

Pros & Cons

Indoor Flight Video

Download Link (right click & "save as")

Conclusion

I've had a few months that I have owned and flown the Vortex I have come to quite like the model. It tracks very well outside when sports flying, extremely well in fact for a 250 class and it is accurate enough to fly in a hall doing a 3-D flight without having to worry too much about accuracy or the tail blowing out.

The motor supplied with the model is excellent and a welcome change from the motor supplied with a T Rex 250.

The overall design, frame stiffness and tail drive are an improvement over other models in the 250 class but these tempered by a few issues.

Having to split the side frames in order to replace a main gear is one of the major flaws in the model design, I also feel the aluminium swash plate ball if not lubricated probably can lead to the collective jamming and potentially causing the machine to crash. The aluminium used is a little soft on some parts but this will only be a problem in a crash or if the builder gets too heavy-handed during the build process.

Overall I would actually recommend the Vortex for a more advanced flyer over the T Rex 250. However for a beginner I would probably recommend the T Rex 250 as I think it would probably fare better in a crash.
The Vortex for an advanced flier is the best 250 class I have flown to date and for 3D flight if you are after a 250 sized model I'd recommend it.

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