I run liquid graphite on teh shafts. That old one was a shaft from HK. Very soft metal and very horribly polished. The Align shaft will be much more smooth. Now I just need to get the binding out of the links and the mixing arm bearings. Oh, and I need to rebuild the head and grease the thrust bearings. Once I get some new servos for this thing, it's going to be a very solid bird. At this time, I see no need to upgrade to Align CF blades, or spin or any of the others. These will do fine for what I do. But, with these crap servos, I'm going to constantly be fighting hard collective changes (like when I almost plowed it into the ground) and the slop makes it IMPOSSIBLE to do anything inverted. Once you go inverted, the entire helicopter setup changes because of the slop.