Upgrading old Park Flyers?

[Hoomi]

So, out in my storage shed, I have an old Parkzone Firebird and Fighterbird. These planes came with older style radios and NiMH batteries, and were about as basic in control as an RC plane could get. The Firebird used only throttle for climb or descend (no elevator), and pulled one side of the V-tail or the other up for turning, and I think the Fighterbird worked about the same way (found it at a thrift store, complete in box, but never tried flying it).

Maybe it's been all those videos from FliteTest, where they make the oddest things fly, or maybe just the idea of adding a couple more planes to the active hanger, but I've been thinking of pulling those old planes out of storage and upgrading them with new receivers that will bind with my Tx, reconfiguring the controls for true V-tail elevator/rudder mixing, and going with LiPo batteries.

While my initial thought was that, "voltage is voltage," my impression from other things I've read online is that an ESC designed for old NiMH batteries is not a good match for modern LiPo. I also need to check if the motor wiring is basic two-wire, or the three-wire common in my current planes.

Has anyone here done an upgrade to an old park flyer, and/or have any sage advice?

[fhhuber]

The LVC will be wrong for LiPo. The LiPo can drive higher current for the same nominal voltage due to lower voltage drop under load.

We used to get little external LVCs that go between ESC and RX + have leads to detect the battery voltage.

So, you can drop in LiPo of the closest (rounded down) voltage. Because the LiPo is so much lighter, you can put in much higher mah for longer duration.

Or you can gut it and put in a complete new motor, ESC, RX and real sub-micro servos to get more positive control.