SAB ILGoblin PRO 590 Orange w/ Main and Tail Blades

This is an amazing helicopter! This is my first SAB, and the engineering on this heli is amazing! Great, perfect size heli

SAB kits are very well organized and easy builds. I haven’t started it yet (waiting for the motor) but I look forward to building and flying this helicopter.

I was lucky enough to get a few of these early and it is by far my favorite SAB heli to date, at least of the ones that I have flown (SG766, SG760, SG762, SG525, SG426). It is amazing. The way it flies, the sound, the smoothness, it's all around the perfect size, weight, power to weight and overall handling. It's not too big, not too small. The transmission is great and is a huge improvement over the direct belt driven models.

The servo layout is great, and I find it makes the swash leveling easier and seems to contribute to the amazing flight characteristics. One of my favorite things is the flexibility on the battery. I am running three different ones: 6S, 8S and 12S. The 12s flies the best and is by far my favorite. I am running an 4025-1120 in the 6S and get about 7 minutes at 2100 RPM. Both the 8S and 12S are running 4030 motors (4030-800 and 4030-560) and I like this setup better than the 4025. I can easily notice the extra power and recommend the 4030.

I get over 11 minutes of mild 3D on the 12S with a 6000 mAh pack @2100 RPM. My 8S setup does not have the right motor pulley yet so I will not report those run times, but they are not much better than the 6S setup.

The finish, the carbon fiber, the panels, the way it is built, it's a solid machine. I have had 3 minor crashes so far, no parts have needed replacing which is great. I did blow out the bearings on the Pulley Bracket Assembly (H2497), but I attribute that to tightening the belt too much. I used a screwdriver to get it as tight as possible, but I believe the intent is to let the springs self tighten the motor mount before you tighten all the screws down. Either way, you can give it a little push and get it tight enough; don't use leverage to tighten it as this will put too much stress on the Pulley Bracket.

The 520 was so under built and that was my main complaint, this model is absolutely overbuilt, in every way. The tail setup is from the Piuma and is solid, though I wish I could find a D8 pulley with 18T or 19T so I could just setup the D8 tail instead of the D6. Nonetheless, it's a solid setup and I could not be happier.

Now the bad. The tail servo mounting hardware and mounting location are fabulous, but the screws that they give you with the kit (M25.x8mm) are not long enough to attach the plate to the tail. They do not thread into the nylon on the lock nuts inside the tail. Maybe all of my kits were just not right, but I had to use 10mm screws. Worse, the screws that attach the tail to the main frame, they are partially threaded. When I attached the tail it was fine, but after the first flight I noticed the tail was very loose. As you may know, the double sided tape that is used to attach the tail hardware tends to ooze around and over time you have to tighten the tail screws. The partially threaded screws did not have enough thread to tighten the tail! I had to use different screws with a much longer partial thread. Maybe this is by design, where the tail is suppose to flop around and be sloppy, but that is not for me so I swapped out the factory screws with ones that are the same length, but have longer threads.

There are some oddities in the instructions. The very first diagram has the bottom servo bracket upside down (from the way it should be), which you can see in the second image of the instructions where it is correctly depicted. I had no idea how far to screw down the motor mount set screws (pg 6) and there are three sets of springs included for the motor assembly, but no details on which set you should use. On page 21, the M3 screws that go through the tail fin, into the tail case spacer, they should probably be M3x10mm not M3x8mm.

Overall, I give this guy a 10/10. It is amazing. I will never fly the 520 again. The 10mm shaft, the battery flexibility, the handling / flight characteristics, and the overbuild of the model are all key points for me. I will be flying this bird for many years to come! Great job SAB!