Paint stir that helicopter!
What is a Paint Stirrer?
A Paint Stirrer is traditionally done in the tail-down position to emulate a stick stirring paint, but can be be done in any of the orientations, including tail-up and tail left or right.
Essentially it’s a tictoc where the tail is moved left and right slightly during each tictoc so as to create a stirring motion with the helicopter.
How do I learn it?
Most people will learn this in an instinctive way, where they can already do tictocs, and they add some rudder in at each end to get the stir effect. This is a great way to learn and will feel really natural. You’ll find your most natural position and figuring it out isn’t difficult at all.
However, once you try and do other orientations or reverse the direction, basically anything outside of your favourite orientation, that’s when things get a lot harder, and having a plan or exercise can help.
45° Flips Exercise
The best exercise to learn new orientations of the Paint Stirrer is 45° flips and quarter piros.
- Start with the helicopter in a 45° inverted nose-in/left hover.
- Flip it to upright to a tail-in/left hover.
- Quarter piro right to tail-in/right hover.
- Flip it back to inverted nose-in/right hover.
- Quarter piro left, back to the start position.
Once you’ve got the stick movements to do the 45° flips back and forth, you can start getting quicker and not go flat at each end. The idea is to get each end steeper and steeper, until you have what looks like tictocs with the rudder changes.
Conclusion
Learning the first orientation is easy, learning new ones is hard, so this is where the exercises help.
You can use it to learn clockwise, counter-clockwise and skids-in paint stirrers.
Until next time!
