• Broke the Reedy Esc

    I’ve not written about the Team Associated B64s we now own yet, which I’ll get round to at some point but suffice to say the kids have one and I have my own. When I received mine, the ESC case was broken with signs of it being cyno’ed back together at least once. I did the same again hoping it would last for a good while. I’ve since heard anecdotal evidence that these Reedy ESC’s are known to have weak cases.

    Well… Last weekend we went racing with the guys from my flying club. Who it turns out mostly run 1/8 scale cars and, unlike the car club we also race with, were mostly bashing around the track. I got a few good laps in, the Ballistic Buggy Spike tyres giving good grip on our astro turf runway.

    And then the inevitable happened, I flipped the car, there was no marshalling so the car sat stranded upside down, then 💥 I got hit hard in the left hand side by a big truggy going at speed. Immediately I noticed that applying throttle had no effect so I feared the wost.

    Back at home it was clear the ESC case had broken again but this time when I lifed the PCB out of the case one of the little yellow transistors (maybe? I’m no electronics expert) was sitting in the bottom of the case. Oh well ¯\(ツ)/¯ you live and learn.

    Asking some of the members of our car racing club, the suggestion was a Hobbywing Quicrun 10BL120 Sensored ESC would be a good replacement, so I placed an order with Modelsport and got one sent.

    Last night I got it installed and soldered to the motor, it all seems fine we are back and ready for the next outing.


  • New Compressor

    For various reasons, I’ve been contemplating a new compressor for a while now. The current one is very small, mainly designed for small airbrushes and the like, while fine for its intended purpose, painting larger areas with a small airbrush was becoming a bit of a chore. What I really wanted was a larger paint gun, which meant a bigger compressor. Of course once a decent sized compressor was installed it would find other uses, like cleaning the cars or driving small tools around the workshop.

    I’ve seen the Lidl one a few times now, but have never quite felt up to taking the plunge, it is quite big and my shed isn’t, but this weekend while having a general tidy up and moving a few things into the loft, it dawned on me that a space had opened up where I thought it would fit. Hmm, thats one less reason to not do it then!

    One impromtu trip to Lidl later and I had one in the boot, along with a cleaning gun set (including a handy tyre inflator) and a nice wall mountable reel hose. The plan is to mount the reel on the inside of the shed near the door which means its easily long enough to reach outside for cleaning things, or the bench for spraying.

    I need to get a moisture/oil trap at some point and wire a few more sockets in the shed but its all looking good. Long term I have a vague plan of moving it into the second shed and running a air hose through the small gap between them into the main shed, that’ll certainly move the source of noise away from where I’ll be working. But for now I can put up with the noise. Running some structured air hose around the shed presenting a quick release socket near the bench might also be a nice idea, something to ponder later :)


  • Updates

    I’ve made a few changes to the models page, specifically breaking Aircraft, Boats, Cars and Helicopters out into their own pages.

    Also made a post and a page about the VMC Tiger Moth.

    Made a few old posts (so they fit in correctly with the timeline) about the Desert Fox here and here.

    Made a few holding pages about some recent cars here, here, here and here.

    And finally, I’ve updated the Dominus page with the recent news about the car.


  • Vmc Tiger Moth

    I’ve made a page for the VMC Tiger Moth here, its a lovely little kit, we are hoping it will fly as well as it went together!