Couple of ?s!

[charliejp]

I finally got all my crawler stuff here. I started hooking up all the electrics and now I just have to solder the motor wires but I'm having a real hard time. I just got a little cheapy solder gun at the auto parts store. Where or who makes a good one? Does Radio Shack have a decent one that will work? I'm very limited here to availability.

Can I just run the truck to discharge the batteries or do I need to do something else? The lipos instructions say to charge and discharge a few time to get maximum power supply. I'm a total noob to this electric stuff and am slightly overwhelmed.

 

[surgemaster1970]

A good quality battery charger also has a battery discharge mode too...you should use that...you're not supposed to put a load on the brand new batteries to discharge them..If you use the truck to discharge them you might aswell skip the rest of the procedure...You want to charge the battery full and then discharge w/o load.The next time its fully charged it will charge up stronger than before...doing this 2-3 times insures maximum battery charge life and useage......

Any solder gun that can heat above 750 degrees is a good one....the problem is probably your solder or soldering technics.....to solder wires you must cut and strip the wire and heat the wire with the iron and then take liquid flux and dip the wire then reheat before tinning or use the rosin core solder and tin the wire with the solder first to get an easy quality connection...

 

[charliejp]

This is the charger that I bought http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXPZT6 . How important is this battery cycling? Will it seriously effect the life of the lipos to just use them?

I'm not 100% positive what solder I was using as it came with the gun but I will check to make sure I have the right set up tomorrow. I've had decent luck soldering before but I was using my step fathers equipment and never really paid attention to what that was.

 

[surgemaster1970]

Those cheapo sets come with cheap quality solder...Radioshack rosin core or electrical grade with a bottle of liquid flux will be better..

Cycling a battery before loading it is very important....It could mean up to an extra 4 mins of runtime and up to 30 extra recharges with longer pack life...when a pack gets older around 100 recharges the runtime usually diminishes at a rate of up to 1-5 seconds every recharge so getting the max life out of it will be very frugal especially with the price of them to replace...

That charger has no specs but it looks to be a charger only...The larger Venom setups are more on the lines I was talking about...

http://www.venom-group.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=VEN-0657

 

[h8z2luze]

Glad to hear you got your stuff man! Lets see some pics!

 

[abadk9420]

This might help you with your soldering, some of the biggest things to remember is to make sure your soldering iron is fully hearted up, make sure you clean the tip and tin it with solder often, like before each thing you solder, do not use lead free solder, it sucks! I prefer a rosin core solder, and use flux on your on what you are soldering, it helps the solder to flow better and stick better to what your soldering.

https://www.rcnitrotalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=70574
https://www.rcnitrotalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=70566

 

[slowngreen]

what lipo's did you get? the mystery packs? make sure you setup your cutoff on your esc first! but then i personally wouldnt worry about doing anything to them, charge em and then just run em. i get hundreds of cycles on ALL of my crawler/scaler packs without every doing anything to them first.

 

[charliejp]

Setup cut off on esc? I got everything connected this morn and ready to run. I just need to know what to do as far as programming? I did plug it in. Did I seriously screw up? Or do I just need to program the esc? I've got to go to work for a while but will be back to it tonight. Thanks for the soldering tips!

 

[slowngreen]

what esc? i can't remember but if you got a sidewinder or mamba then ya just hook it up with the castle link (assuming you got one) and then program it to brushed, 100% drag break, and depending on wich lipo you have (2 or 3s) set up the cut off. i always did 3.2 per cell, so 6.4 for 2s, 9.6 for 3s. just the way i personally do it.

 

[charliejp]

OK, I think I'm good with the esc program. Do I need to program the BEC? I'm almost crawlin!

 

[slowngreen]

yeah. set it up to like 6.1 or 6.2v.

 

[charliejp]

Cool. Thanks man! I'll try to throw up a couple of pics tonight!

 

[RC Addict]

Charlie... You must post pics...

 

[charliejp]

I did in my other thread.