Helicopters fly best when they are properly trimmed and balanced. Keeping a heli tuned and ready for action is part of the fun. It might take a while to amass the collection of tools and materials described below but sooner or later you are going to need—
Basic tools to keep a bird in the air
- 'allen' hex wrenches: 1 mm, 1.5 mm (get two of these), 2 mm.
- fine needle nose pliers
- small electrician's pliers
- diagonal cutters, small
- X-acto hobby knives / saws
- soldering gun or iron
- good lighting
Specialized tools for helicopters
- ball-link pliers (gotta have 'em)
- blade balancer (or digital scale sensitive to 1/10 of a gram)
- pitch gauge (for adjusting the angle of the main rotor blades on CP heli's)
- ball-link tool (to make tight links fit right on larger heli's)
- canopy scissors and piercing/hole boring tool
Materials and supplies you will use more or less constantly
- cyano-acrlyate glue (CA), also sold as 'super glue' - fixes almost anything
- small-diameter solder and soldering paste or flux
- heat-shrink tubing to insulate soldered wires
- double-sided foam tape
- velcro tape, used to mount batteries more securely
- zip ties, small and medium
Zip ties, if you don't know them by that name, are 4" to 6" lengths of thin, narrow, nylon with corrugations that have a hole in one end. You feed the tapered tongue through the hole to form a loop around whatever you wish to secure and the toothy corrugations do not let the end of the strip come out of the hole. You can cinch them down quite tightly. Zip ties have a hundred uses in helicopters.
A deluxe tool that I would hate to do without is a high-speed rotary tool for cutting, sanding, shaping and drilling. Dremel is the standard and there are less expensive alterantives.
There are many other tools and items that are useful, but this list is a good start towards keeping your helicopter(s) in the air and flying well.