Monthly Archives: February 2012
The Hunt is Over
Click for bigger map
Whilst going for my bike ride today I found a location to fly my jet. It is Boronia Grove Reserve, no more than 5 minutes drive from the Blackburn Rd exit off the freeway. It even has a car park, so no long treks through mud or long grass, and it also has a toilet block and drinking fountain. What more could I want … Well I would like the wind to disappear for it’s maiden voyage. Or as usual I will just have to wait. Patience is not one of my virtues.
Yeah Boy
My First Jet
I got pretty excited yesterday my special package from Hong Kong rocked up. More importantly I had my jet built in 10 mins, and in another 10 mins i had it all trimmed out ready to go. The unfortunate part is the park I was going to fly it in has bigger trees and smaller amount of open space than I remembered. So this weekend I’m on clear space searching mission ( with the jet in the back of the car ).
Burning Out Batteries
different connection
This connector is normal on all batteries.
smokey bussiness
It's working.
Yesterday I decided to re-wire my Futaba transmitter so I could put another battery inside. For some unknown reason the connectors for the old battery were different to every other battery. This operation required soldering. Now soldering isn’t one of my favourite jobs and I did manage to mess this up. The de-soldering was easy enough and what I thought putting two new wires through would be just as easy. I did a neat job of the soldering … but a couple of threads of wire, off each wire didn’t go through. Once the battery was plugged in my transmitter started to smoke straight away. The battery pack got very hot, started melting the plastic around the wires and the batteries started swelling up. Luckily I could still unplug the the battery pack and threw it onto the middle of the lawn. I have heard of battery packs exploding so I didn’t go near the pack until today. Over night it didn’t explode and nothing else seemed to happen so I was very lucky. Today I wanted to find out if I had only fried the battery pack and not the transmitter, so i managed to remove the connector off the newer battery and got it onto the old battery (which does work, but doesn’t hold a good charge). Plugged it in and “presto” it worked, I am wrapped,that’s one less thing I have to re-purchase.