A main hobbies and Horizon Hobbies have just about everything I need. Horizon is in Illinois and usually get my parts in 1 or 2 days. A main hobbies takes a little longer but ships from California at a decent shipping rate.
OK so why do I dislike Hobby King. Number one I bought 2 batteries from them, it took me almost 2 months to get them to acknowledge that my order must have gotten lost. They kept telling me to contact my post office that they are probably holding them. The tracking number only showed that the order had posted but never moved anywhere. I must have made contact with at least 15 different people and always got the same answer. So if any of you ever have a problem with HK, you have to open a case. I did as instructed and kept getting lame answers. I finally solved the problem by opening 6 cases a day (for the same issue) until I got someone to acknowledge that my order had gotten lost. I mentioned in each case that I would continue opening cases everyday until my problem got resolved. It took 3 days before someone finally decided they should go ahead and cancel out the first order and send my batteries. It still took a week and a half to get my batteries after they placed the order again.
I was contacted a few days after receiving my batteries by a Hobby King customer support representative from California. She told me that communication with foreign tech support gets messed up like that from time to time and was very apologetic about my situation. Didn't offer any coupons or any discounts for my trouble. But asked me to continue to shop Hobby King. I said maybe.
Second, I bought an HK500 don't remember the exact model. It was flybarless with torque tube tail. After spending a month with several quality issues and blaming my IKON gyro, I took the electronics off the heli and it is still sitting in a box in my storage unit. I will not spend another dime on it. I had experimented with some cheap torque tube parts while I was learning and crashing a lot. If you look closely at Align torque tube gear parts you will see the gears are mounted on the shafts with pins. HK and other cheap clone parts use the hot cold method with raised barbed metal on the shaft. Not worth crashing over. I also received my brand new helicopter with a bent main shaft and the blades that came with it were junk. I balanced them but they still wobbled so bad I thought I had a few bent main shafts. Put my align blades on it that's how I figured out the blades were bad.
Back to the barbed metal shaft and plastic gears. My tail kept washing out which was why I blamed the IKON. It ended up being the bevel gear in the front gear set was intermittently slipping. It took a dozen or so flights until one day I spun up the heli and the tail wasn't turning at all. So yes I had a bad experience and maybe they have some useful stuff but I'll stick with the companies that have treated me right and sell quality products. The Heli I am flying was originally a belt drive EXI with flybar. It is now a DFC flybarless, torque tube with 3GX. 95% Align. I don't put cheap parts on it anymore because I am flying much better and I learned my lesson. I was into saving money and although it seemed like I was saving, crashing because of a cheap part does not save anything!
Sorry Tony, had to tell my story.
Ken
