To be honest I was expecting to not really find any difference in the way the model flew with this new head as in most ways it's the same as the standard V2 head except beautifully made in Aluminium, but it was immediately apparent that there is a difference!

What I hadn't taken in to account was as the head is metal it's very rigid where as the plastic head centre must flex a little in flight, the metal one doesn't so the model just feels a little crisper and more accurate!  In every other way the model is unchanged and I didn't have to alter any of the models or transmitters settings, not even adjust the tracking.

Although so far the crappy weather on Sunday meant I only got a couple of flights on the model I did give it plenty of abuse including some tests of the strength of the head by doing full power vertical decent's to get the max possible head speed, I don't know what the head speed went up to at the bottom of these but it was high!  By the above I don't mean a dive but a level decent on idle up and full negative pitch, -9 degrees and 100% throttle, the model is not equipped with a governor.  In any case I am very happy with the heads quality, performance and security.

One related issue which happened to me today for the first time, is I had a mid air boom strike with a friends Raptor 50 V1, I was casually doing some fairly mild Chaos with it (if there is such a thing as mild Chaos) when there was a loud bang, I knew it had boom stuck instantly and auto'd the model down, the only damage was a large flat across the top of the boom, another couple of mm's lower and I am sure the result would have been more dramatic.

I was really surprised by this as I have done more aggressive flying with Raptors before with no problem, what might have been different this time was the model was perhaps running with a slightly slower head speed, there was a gusty wing blowing and the model has had a lot of airtime so the dampers might have been extra soft.

The fact is the damping is a fair bit softer on the V1 than the V2 so if you are using your V1 Raptor for hard 3D stuff then good advice would be to keep the head speed high, make sure the dampers are in good condition, the Quick UK metal head centre should help, I have not looked into it at all but I am sure you could find a way to stiffen the current damping a little, maybe a brass sleeve around the spindle and through the dampers!  Or ultimately consider going to the the later rotor head.