Ewan (and I) got a radio controlled car for Christmas! This post covers some of what I’ve learnt about setting up the car and repairing the car from burnt out cogs and serious head on collisions with brick walls.
It is a Turnigy 1/10 Brushless 2WD Desert Racing Buggy, a car that requires some putting together and extra bits to get it going. All part of the RC hobby experience I am told.
In addition to the car I got:
- Battery – 5000mAh 2S LiPo
- Controller – wheel and trigger style, entry level (needs 8xAA batteries)
- Charger – Duratrax Ice (donated to me by a friend)
- Mains power supply for the charger (it needs 12v at lots of Amps, I got a 2.5A multi voltage black box from Jaycar).
All up the cost for the car and accessories was about $200 (plus shipping)
Charging the battery
The charging process for the LiPo is quite involved. Firstly you need the charger, which runs from a 12v source – originally designed for people to charge from car batteries – and in my case, the mains to 12v power supply.
Secondly you need to know how to program the charger with correct details for your battery.
Once you’re connected and the charger is happy with the settings (it checks to see if you’ve got an appropriate battery connected), then you just have to wait until it stuffs all those milliampere hours of juice in there.
Burnt out slipper clutch / spur gear
On the car’s first outing we had a good zoom around a park area near our house. It was a nice mix of path ways and grass. After about 25mins the car stopped going at it’s usual crazy speed and quickly gave up to just sitting still and making lots of sounds when you reved the throttle. It was quite strange that when you have the car off the ground and gave it throttle the wheels would turn, but if the wheels were on the ground it wouldn’t move. I spoke with my RC savvy friend who told me that it was likely to be a problem with the “slipper clutch”, a foreign concept to me at this point. I got the car home and got the instruction manual out.
Thankfully these cars have very good manuals and plenty of online advice from forums. I quickly found how to remove the cover for the transmission and could immediately see the offending part.
Here you can see the burnt out spur gear and on the right the replaced and well adjusted gear.
I found out that the car I had bought was basically a copy of a Kyosho Ultima DB. This is good news as parts for that car are easy to get hold of. This part was a UM564-82 (82 teeth).
This picture was taken after I had replaced the spur gear, adjusted the tightness of the spring and moved the other gear to be inline.
Along with the one off replacement gear I had found locally in Sydney, I also purchased a couple of spares from eBay.
Broken Suspension
Before taking the car out again I was talking to my RC savvy friend and he said “oh, you’ll want to order some part suspension parts, they’ll be the first things to go”.
So with this I went out and had one of those crashes you see in formula one races. The car hits the barrier, suspension bends, wheels are dragging along side the car, the only thing I didn’t see was the sparks flying.
After recovering bits of car and going back to the pits (aka the spare room) it turns out that two parts of broke. There is a small plate that connects the front lower suspension arms together and a hub carrier (the thing that holds the wheel to the suspension).
I have attempted to glue the parts, but they are too weak to be used. The front suspension mount was quite weak anyway, as you can see from the photograph it snapped at the thinnest part near where the 4 screws go.
Unfortunately this spare part is on back order, so I’ve temporarily used a couple of cable ties to hopefully, along side the super glue, give it some strength.
I’m waiting for the new suspension and wheel knuckle parts to turn up. As my friend advised, I’ve ordered a few as I don’t think this will be the last time this will happen!
Ewan driving the desert buggy
