Yes, the cyclic was a bit laggy, but it could be quite powerful. The main thing to be aware of was that it varied with rotor speed. In normal flight it was fine, but as you throttled back to land (fixed pitch!), the nose would tend to come up, and you could run out of forward cyclic to keep it down! If it got too extreme, the only option was to open the throttle and increase the rpm - but that resulted in gaining height again! Oh, what fun we had! :)

Actually, the Lark head doesn't teeter - its a rigid rotor design. Having said that, there is a small amount of play in the "bearings" which allows a very minimal amount of teeter. The designer did make a teetering head for it, but it didn't work. A combination of light blades and low head-speed meant there wasn't enough centrifugal force to keep the blades under control. Even with the heavy blades used for fly-barless, it was still almost unflyable with any appreciable amount of teeter. I locked mine up solid again, which made a huge improvement in controllability...!

The trick with any fixed pitch machine is to set the pitch so that it needs about 75-80% of the available power to lift off in calm conditions. It should only climb slowly until you transition into forward flight. If you don't set it like this, you will find it *very* difficult to get down - especially in a breeze! You have to slow the rotors up so much, that the cyclic becomes ineffective at keeping the nose down!

I think its your eyes! ;) Its a perfectly standard clockwise rotation set up. The blades are cut-down Hirobo Shuttle blades.

For most of its life it has been flown without a gyro, but now that I'm a lot older, and neither my reactions nor my eyesight are what they once were, I use a basic CSM piezo gyro in it (rate only - no heading hold). I have owned it and flown it from new, nearly 50 years ago!

@@pchristy102 Thank you !

Well, that one in the video was bought for me for Christmas, by my wife, in 1974. It still flying today, nearly 50 years on, and still has many of the original parts on it. It is one of four that I now have. One is an original Mk1 (as mine started out) complete with HB25 motor, and two (Mk 2s) have been converted to electric. All still fly well. I can only conclude that you must have been doing something wrong...

@@pchristy102 I had others help me that where r/c Heli pilot they gave up They were crap.the shops gave up selling them.

@@Imagineering100 No, they were cheap - and intentionally so. When they first came out, they were a quarter of the cost of their nearest rival. So were the spares. At the time, a rotor shaft for a Schluter Cobra cost several £. For a Lark it was 75p! And you could actually straighten Lark shafts with your bare hands and carry on flying, albeit rather shakily! They were extremely popular where I lived - nearly everyone in the club had one at one time or another - and introduced a lot of people to helicopters, who would not otherwise have been able to afford it. The biggest mistake most pilots made was trying to "improve" them, as they refused to believe that anything so simple could fly. All that did was usually add weight. Built as designed, they flew very well, and could be repaired cheaply and easily, often with stuff from the local hardware store!

@@pchristy102 They crap I had help from other heli pilots they gave up the shops stopped selling them because they were crap.