I've been flying helis since 1974, starting off with a Morley (built from plans in the days before he did kits!) before "progressing" on to  Lark, which I still have and fly regularly. I was recently approached by a retired friend - nowadays only a boat modeller - who had one of the UHF radio sets I designed some years ago which was in need of attention. One set of replacement nicads later, and it was time to return the repaired transmitter.

In the course of our conversation he revealed that he had once toyed with helicopters, and that his machine was still in the attic. Would I like it in payment for the repairs? Needless to say, I was fascinated by the prospect, and half an hour later I was looking over a very dusty, but substantially intact, DS-22! He had bought it off Dave Nieman in the mid 70s, and had only tried to fly it once, frightening himself half to death in the process!

The model had been fitted with the collective pitch upgrade, and although the mechanics needed quite a bit of work doing, the body and blades were pretty much OK. A deal was struck, and I left with my new-old model!

Some years ago, I had Schluter Gazelle, which I foolishly destroyed experimenting with flybar-less rotor-heads. The Gazelle was reduced to confetti, but I still had all the mechanics and engine (a rear induction HP61) which were almost identical to that used in the DS-22. After quite a bit of cleaning, and much mixing and matching between the two sets of mechanics, I had the machine all finished and ready to fly again. I took it down to the big heli meet at Charmouth (same week-end as Halton, unfortunately) where it had its first flight since January 1976!

It attracted a lot of attention, but carburettor problems with the old engine prevented me from doing any proper circuits with it - extended hovering was the order of the day! Over the next couple of weeks, I did a lot of experimenting, trying to get the engine to transit between tick-over and running settings without cutting, but without much success. The attached photo was taken at the helicopter team trials at Newground on the 13th of October, when I put it up for a hop during the lunch-break! Again, the engine was proving unreliable, so flying was restricted to hovering.

I've passed some video footage of the model in action back to the original owner, who is delighted to see it in the air again. I've promised to take him up to the field when I get it fully sorted so he can see it flying properly! I have recently fitted a Kavan carburettor to try and improve the throttling of the engine. Although I've fired it up and had it ticking over in the back garden, I haven't had the opportunity yet to do any power runs to see if this has cured the reliability problem. If not, I still have an old Webra 61 which I bought in 1967 and is still very serviceable, which ought to do nicely...............!Peter Christy