To butcher - or not?

[Kazzer]

My X Craft is almost completely repaired, so I must now concentrate on understanding the WTC that came with it. I'm not altogether sure what voltage it was running at, but first guess is 11-12 volts with NiCad batteries.

I want to standardise my batteries and thought our 11 volt 3200ma Visleros would do the job. Unfortunately, as you can see, they are a hair long for these moveable trays.

It's hard to see the tray here, but there is an 'end-cap' at each end of it. These slide along on the two brass rods, pushed by a servo. The object being to use their weight to adjust final trim. It's a neat idea, but I honestly think it's overkill. I am probably wrong! The square grey objects are lead weights. The battery is held in place by Velcro.




Here you can see the end-cap and the rods sliding through it.



Unfortunately, my battery is about 1/8" too long, and it won't quite sit into the tray.



My thoughts are to just cut the end-caps down a bit to let the battery drop into the tray just enough to clear the Lexan tube. But, I hate to butcher the thing, it's well engineered, and I'm no engineer!

What do you think?

[vital.spark]

Hello Mike,

Why not just use a smaller Lipro as there are other sizes that you don't stock?

Regards,

Myron

[He Who Shall Not Be Named]

Cut the acrylic! But, will you retain the ability to slide the pack longitudinally at least a half-inch? Pretty tight in there. I agree, a well engineered unit there.

This beast only has stern planes, to the ability to change the mean pitch angle is a big plus here.

David

[Kazzer]

Hello Mike,

Why not just use a smaller Lipro as there are other sizes that you don't stock?

Regards,

Myron

There is a minimum qty I have to import, and for one b astard size, it's not an option. I'd rather make the boat fit the sizes we carry in stock.

[vital.spark]

Who said anything about importing! Just go online and find a U.S. stockest and buy one battery.

[Kazzer]

Who said anything about importing! Just go online and find a U.S. stockest and buy one battery.

I simply wanted to ensure I can use stuff that I have in stock. If The Company has it, I don't pay for it. However, I have coughed up for a couple of Nicads and stuck them in there. I used The Company credit card and charged it to 'experimental work'!

Ha! Ha! Ha!

And when I plugged them in the pitch controller worked immediately, so this morning, I hope to set up the Sombra Labs receiver and adjust the trim etc. The pool was available yesterday (no ice) but I see its back to normal today.



Is this a pitch controller? It's spaghetti junction in there, so its hard to follow.




And what's this?






Even more puzzling?

This European stuff - sheeesh!

[Subculture]

It's not overkill, it's refined, and once you try it, you won't want to go back to poncing about with bits of lead.

Two things. First of all, this boat ran on 7.2 volts, it used two packs of sub-c NimH batteries wired in parallel- Nigel has some strong opinions about the use of lipos in submarines. So if you want to run lipo and keep the original speed, use two packs of 2S lipo in parallel, and you might also want to consider wiring in a lipo guard, and fit a fuse on the main power line. Also bear in mind that as lipos tend to be much lighter than NiMH, the ballast shifting won't work as well unless you compensate the difference by adding some lead to the packs. Personally I'd just cough up for a couple of packs of NiMH's, then you won't have to tweak anything.

The things in the pictures are-

Picture 1- An LR2 leveller from Norbert Bruggen- the sticker has gone missing in action.

Picture 2- An ESC from Ripmax, which I think from memory will go up to 12 volts maximum. I hope that isn't the antenna wrapped around the brass rod on the left of the picture- don't do that- it's bad pratice.

Picture 3- A separate Linear BEC. That one is home brewed and should deliver about 1A of current at 5 volts.