leccyflyer

Posted by Tim Hooper on 20/06/2011 17:52:03: Surely it's all relative to the distance travelled and the number of people you're paying admission for? Whilst BEB spent £93 taking and feeding his fambly, that doesn't apply to all the punters, surely?  In our case, just two adults (£19). We travelled a whole 10 miles to get there, and took our own food. From my particular perspective the day was an absolute bargain! We bought lots of balsa at well-below shop prices, and easily saved the admission charge. Some splendid displays to ooh and aah over, met lots of friends etc.  Having said that, the penny dropped several years ago that I far prefer to attend a fly-in, crash some models and meet lots of others on an equal footing. So see you at Greenacres!  tim   You said pretty much what I was going to say Tim.  My preference has long been for fly-ins rather than the big shows, of which more later. With being away so much later and with a forecast ba day in the NW a last minute decision saw me arrange to pick up a pal and head to Weston Park for the first time in many years. The £9.50 entrance fee wasn't extortionate, IMO, parking was easy and there was a decent selection of stalls. The balsa in the SLEC tent made it worthwhile attending, and paid the admission cost, in savings made, I picked up a bargain ARTF too.  There were huge numbers of small foamie toys, co-ax helis and RFT models, more Extras and Yaks than you could shake a stick at, but some more interesting kit and bits hidden away too.   The food was grimmer than a grim thing, with big queues and high prices, but that was expected. Served me right for not bringing any butties.  The full size displays were great - loved the Fox glider doing continuous rolls on the towline and those Spittie-look-alikes. I think the flying side is actually more for those participating, and the members of the public who haven't seen it before, than it is for the non-participating modellers. Much of the general flying isn't all that different than that available at a busy club site.  With the exception of the big Me262 an the massed bands of the Dawn Patrol I didn't see too many modellers standing watching the flying. Too busy buried in the bargain hunt maybe.  Didn't stay until the end, for the pyrotechnics, and so was able to make an easy get-away without any queues. Only sorry to have missed you on the day, Tim!     Edited By leccyflyer on 21/06/2011 00:05:52

Followed Maynard Hill's TAM5 flight in real time on that tinternet thing when it happened.

Indeed - the majority of Spektrum flyers at the club have their TX antenna orientated sideways, parallel to the ground, so as not to point directly at the model and I believe that information came from one of the early adopters of the technology, who is in the trade.  The manual doesn't say anything about the actual orientation, but in an appendix of generic safety information states that the TX antenna shouldn't point at the model. OTOH the Frsky modules state categorically that the TX antenna should be vertical.

What is the source of the correct transmitter antenna orientation photo above? There's nothing that I can see in the DX-7 manual that instructs users to tilt the antenna so that the tip is vertical.

Posted by Steve W-O on 03/06/2011 09:54:04: Is anyone else of the opinion that prices on ebay are becoming very high? I see that the motors and ESCs are very pricey, kits and ARTFs are 10% or more higher than available elsewhere. I have bought two cameras in the last few months, a total of £80 less than I could have bought them for on ebay.  I tend to use ebay to see what is available, then when I see what I am looking for, do a search on the net and find the best price. Looks like their fees (along with paypal) are having a negative effect, it is no longer the place to find a bargain, unless you happen to get lucky. The prices are often ridiculous. I was watching a used Mega motor the other evening, It eventually sold for about £64, which was about £4 cheaper than a brand new one. Bonkers.

As has been suggested, mothball the model that "bit" you and maybe look at the possibility of fitting four strokes, remote needle valve assembly add-ons or new engines with the angled needle valves to keep your hands well away from the prop arc. Maybe that will get some of your confidence back. 

I actually meant ME guys, not you!

48" is perfect Tim with that power train in mind. All you need to do now is to educate the readers into actually reading the thread title properly!

Looks brilliant Tim - positively unique! What sort of size were you thinking of?

Posted by Phil Winks on 23/03/2009 11:57:38: Just goes to show if you stick a pole on the edge of a flying field no matter how out of the way you think it is some one will hit it Talking of which..... we had another limbo comp at our fun fly day a few weeks ago. The poles are slightly over 1/2" thick and six models were damaged during the 40 minutes they were up. Only one of those models were competing. The other five were just trying to avoid the limbo all together!    Edited By leccyflyer on 01/05/2011 11:12:01 Edited By leccyflyer on 01/05/2011 11:12:25

No chance of any flying here today - other than wheelie bins - it's blowing a flamin' hoolie

I think the point being made is that the extra motor run, with the battery voltage aready low - it was only reading 18% left at the end of the flight (though a record of the actual voltage would be more useful) - may have been sufficient to drop the pack voltage down to a level insufficient to sustain the receiver. That would only need to be a momentary drop of the pack, under heavy load, to less than the required input voltage for the RX.

Ah, right - our posts crossed and from the earlier picture I thought your ESC was going in the enclosed battery compartment.

Olly Will you be putting any directed cooling air onto the ESC in that position?  On my Webbit I incorporated a pair of air scoops on the side of the fuselage (fashioned from plastic spoons) with a short angled plastic tube (though paper tube would hae been lighter) to cure the warming effects of ESC and battery in an enclosed space. The bottom hatch had a hole in as a warm air exit.     

How many servos are you using and how many servos is the BEC rated for? It does sound like you might have run the battery down to such a state that the voltage was depressed below that required by the receiver, during that motor run.

Thirty quid for something you can do with a piece of scrap wood?  A 4" square piece of 3/8" balsa with a couple of wooden clothes pegs glued to it makes a great soldering jig.  Another piece of 4" square 3/8" balsa with different sized holes drilled in it sees to the bullet connectors. Wen the holes get a bit sloppy, drill some more.  Or for a longer term solution use a short length of 2"x1" PAR softwood. with those holes drilled in it

Posted by Erfolg on 27/04/2011 16:40:30: When I first startedelectric flying I used the green HXT housings, which seem similar to ESC, style housings obtained from the business that Walter Wilkinson ran, I forget the nameof the company. Although the housings were far better in my opinion than just bullet connectors, they were a long assembly and expensive. I being the only user in the club. The rest of the club using bullet connectors, some with the battery female being shrouded and others the male. The size of the bullets was equally varied.  Although Leccyflyers club remains a strong ho;ld of the bullet method, our own has moved on, I strongly suspect driven by how the Lipos are currently supplied. I have never seen a Rhino Lipo supplied with bullets, from HK. Then again I only have 4 of them, when I guess they are selling thousands of them. My own all have come with XT60's housings. As to the standard of soldering, well I wish I was as good.  If the question are any better than the others, then I would be hard pushed to come up with any convincing argument that pointed to any one being significantly better. I use Deans because from HK they are affordable and relatively safe and circumstances have lead me this way.  Who said anything about my club? I mix with electric flyers from far and wide, not just from my own club, and have done for years.  The recent reports of failures amongst knock-off HK Deans connectors caused me to abandon a temporary and ill advised dalliance with those tools of the devil when a couple of them started to show signs of intermittent connection. That was after discarding maybe one in ten of them as not being fit for purpose in the first place, such that they never got to see either soldering iron, or cable.  There's a nice man who did an excellent survey of the main connector types, in terms of their resistance etc and the 4mm gold plated bullets came out of that survey with decent results.  Walter's business was Hillcott Electronics BTW. he used to sell a lot of 4mm bullet connectors The other e-flight suppliers still do.

Posted by Tim Mackey - Administrator on 27/04/2011 16:26:48:  TBH - the first job with any pack received is to cut off whatever stupid connector is fitted, and fit my own.  Good man - you know it makes sense.

Posted by Chris Bott on 27/04/2011 14:35:50: I think this shows the inconsistency of what is being delivered from the far east. Hence the reason for not adopting every new type of connector that comes out and accepting having to replace whatever comes on the battery. Exactly. I'll raise another point here - has anyone ese actually checked the quality of the soldering of these connectors on their packs?  I know that my flying pal was less than impressed with the manner in which the connectors on some of his HK packs had been done. He was able to take off the fitted 5.5mm connectors with a minimum of effort as there was very little solder involved. He replaced them with 4mm connectors, to match the rest of his gear.

They probably put them on just so that there's something on there, rather than bare wires. It used to be Molex/Tamiya connectors. The 4mm gold-plated bullet connectors inside those horrible plastic housings are actually decent quality connectors. It's only the grotty plastic housing and reverse polarity that spoils them.

Posted by Erfolg on 27/04/2011 12:49:18: From my experience, most electric fliers have gravitated to polarised single female plugs on their Lipos.  I use Deans, as that was once the standard. More are gravitating to EC3 as that is more often and not the supplied state, now. Very few use bullet connectors today.  Really? I find that most surprising as most of the electric flyers that I know - and I are one - use bullet connectors.  Practically the first thing that I do after checking the voltage of a received battery pack is cut off those horrid EC3 things (which appear to mangle their lips after just a few insertions) and get some proper bullet connectors on there.

Posted by Chris Bott on 27/04/2011 13:09:19: I use bullet almost exclusively, always have, see no reason to change yet. It makes for very easy series linking of packs etc too. Yep - that's the biggest advantage. To make a series connection with Deans, or any of these other blocked connectors tends to involve a bunch of extra wire length, which is Not A Good Thing. Series connection with bullets is dead easy and can be as short as you like.

I've twice connected a NiMh/Nicd battery to itself.Haven't doe it to a lipo, but I've seen the spark and corrosion associated with a momentary short on inadequately shielded connectors. Not something to mess with.  The common denominator in making that fatal connection was someone chattering to me whilst I was making the connection, buried deep in the fuselage, and me not giving it the full attention it deserved.  In both cases the battery got very hot, very quickly - one lead desoldered itself from the end of the battery terminal in one case and I was able to wrench the connectors apart in the other case and lob the battery like a hand grenade. Now, if someone is chattering I consciously stop what I'm doing and wait until I'm not distracted. I've also attempted to make it impossible to make such a connection, by use of lead length and that wrap of heatshrink.  I also, many, many years ago, made the mistake of taking the bare wire ends on the charging leads held in those little lead clamps on the old style chargers, rather than removing the plug. The two lead instantly welded themselves together, glowed bri red and burst into flames, whilst the heatshrink on the 4 cell NiCd pack melted, welding it to my hand.It took a lot of shaking and cussing to free my hand,

Posted by Phil B on 27/04/2011 07:40:37: Any batteries I have bought pre fitted from the factory have had two female connectors. Every battery that I have ever bought has either ha unfinished wires (with a bit of heatshrink) or some form of polarised connector. Even those hideous EC3 things have one male and one female connector, underneath the plastic coating.  The "two females on the battery leads" set ups that I've sen have been user installed and rank just below the "two males on the battery" on the list of "Oooooops! moments about to happen" list.  Rest assured, without polarised connectors it is only a matter of time before they are inadvertently connected the wrong way round. Colour coding is not enough.

The assignment of male bullet connector on the positive battery lead and female connector on the negative battery lead is base on two things a. protection against connecting to the ESC with reverse polarity  and,  b. a throwback to the early days when many folks charged from their car battery, with the charger balanced on the bodywork. With most UK cars being negative earthed the momentary touch of an exposed male connector from the charging lead onto the bodywork might have fried the charger. Therefore, by convention, the female bullet was put on the positive lead from the charger, and everything else follows from there.  The convention does raise the possibility of inadvertently connecting the battery to itself, but that can be avoie by careful selection of lead length and by a single wrap of heatshrink or tape around the leads, making that impossible. You only need to connect a battery to itself just once to see the need for such measures.........