Anyone Into Unlimited Hydros?

[Aros]

I made it out to the races in Longview, WA today. It was a great time. Unfortunately I couldn't stick around as long as I would have liked due to taking my daughter to the train station to return home but I received invaluable advice from Brad and Brian. Two folks that like Clugh, know their stuff.

The quick synopsis is that they both think my CG is within limits to go ahead and test her out on the water. Brian gave me a 3-blade prop he thinks will be better suited for my maiden voyage versus the 2-blade speedster I have. Also, Brian thinks the motor should be moved well aft of its current position and that way I can put the ESC in the forward compartment and batteries forward for better CG.

I swapped out the 2-blade prop that it came with with the 3-blade prop Brian gave me. However, I am confused. All I did was remove that tubing in the aft section, remove the prop and put the new prop in and put the tubing back in place. Is that all there is to securing a prop? It seems like I am missing a step (photo below).

I was thrilled to hear by both of these gents that they felt it was ready to maiden "As Is", of course not going balls to the wall full throttle, but testing it out, getting a feel for her, and like Brian said, "if you feel her starting to lift in the front, ease back on the throttle." Simple but good advice.

Everyone was very kind and generous with their compliments. There were many fine boats there today but mine seems to have that extra "shine" to her, lol.

Here's a super quick video I took of Brad running one of his heats for the day. He's the lead boat.

[Aros]

Pretty please let us see some (on waterpics) we have seen some great ones so far mayb that roostertail i thought flight was complicated(naa)

If I manage to get some you can be assured I will post them here! Keep an eye out!

[Aros]

No problem. See if you can get the batteries further towards the front of the boat as the ballast or any of the other running gear. That way you will be adding less overall weight to the running boat. On your next build this is something to think about. What I'm doing in my latest build is pushing the motors as far forward as possible and running a longer supported wire drive with a gradual bend system from Brent Byers. Talk to Brain about this because maybe he can put the motor father forward for you. Seems daunting but many experienced boaters like him can reconfigure it on a lazy Sunday afternoon. All the alignment references are already in place. 🙏

Take the time and neaten up the wires. Label then if you need to.

TTYS
Hubert

Unfortunately the batteries are too wide to be moved any further forward due to the motor placement. I will have to remove the motor to put the ESC in the forward cubby hole which I prefer and will help a little with weight. I don't see any way around not adding additional weight to get the CG within limits. Meeting the fellas this Saturday I am quite sure they will offer a solution or ideas.

The good news with my EC8 setup, there's really no way to screw up the wires and leads. The series connector plugs into the two LiPos and ESC. The rudder lead is plugged into CH3 I believe and throttle is CH2. Pretty basic. No more plugging in individual +/- bullets! When we connected everything and powered on, you could barely hear any pop or see any spark at all. Plus the ESC has a switch which once everything is plugged in, you just flick the switch and everything works great. I'll learn a lot more by Saturday afternoon!

[f4u ausie]

Pretty please let us see some (on waterpics) we have seen some great ones so far mayb that roostertail i thought flight was complicated(naa)

[Clugh]

So after quite a bit of finagling, buying parts, ESCs, two different kind gents helping solder, a near-death experience, she's working! FULL POWER! This latest gent who soldered all the EC8 connectors for me - and I believe we all agree - said he thinks that ZTW ESC is perfectly fine, but he too could not get it to power up fully. He thinks it needs the programming card to tweak the throttle settings. Either way, the Castle ESC worked perfect right out of the box!

All that is left now is to figure out the rat's nest and the CG issue. Right now it's very "tail heavy" and if the full power we felt today at full throttle is any indication, she will flip right over. So ballast will need to be added in the front. I meet with Brian and Brad Saturday at the race so I am in good hands and suspect they will get me ready to run...Maybe I can even test it in between heats?!

I'll bring my cameras just in case.

Clugh I've said it several times and I will say it again. Thank you so much for taking the time to offer me excellent advice and knowledge. You were an integral part of the process.

No problem. See if you can get the batteries further towards the front of the boat as the ballast or any of the other running gear. That way you will be adding less overall weight to the running boat. On your next build this is something to think about. What I'm doing in my latest build is pushing the motors as far forward as possible and running a longer supported wire drive with a gradual bend system from Brent Byers. Talk to Brain about this because maybe he can put the motor father forward for you. Seems daunting but many experienced boaters like him can reconfigure it on a lazy Sunday afternoon. All the alignment references are already in place. 🙏

Take the time and neaten up the wires. Label then if you need to.

TTYS
Hubert

[Aros]

So after quite a bit of finagling, buying parts, ESCs, two different kind gents helping solder, a near-death experience, she's working! FULL POWER! This latest gent who soldered all the EC8 connectors for me - and I believe we all agree - said he thinks that ZTW ESC is perfectly fine, but he too could not get it to power up fully. He thinks it needs the programming card to tweak the throttle settings. Either way, the Castle ESC worked perfect right out of the box!

All that is left now is to figure out the rat's nest and the CG issue. Right now it's very "tail heavy" and if the full power we felt today at full throttle is any indication, she will flip right over. So ballast will need to be added in the front. I meet with Brian and Brad Saturday at the race so I am in good hands and suspect they will get me ready to run...Maybe I can even test it in between heats?!

I'll bring my cameras just in case.

Clugh I've said it several times and I will say it again. Thank you so much for taking the time to offer me excellent advice and knowledge. You were an integral part of the process.

[Aros]

Thanks! It's one of the races in Longview, WA which is only an hour drive from me so I was planning on bringing my boat there and meet some of the fellas like Brian that have been helping me out. The boat is currently at another guy's place who is going to solder the EC8s on the batteries and ESC for me. Problem was, I didn't have the male 6.5mm connectors I didn't know I needed for that new Castle ESC so we ordered the parts needed. They arrive Saturday. Man, I tell you it's always something!! LOL!

[Clugh]

Purchase castle telemetry for Futaba SBUS. I also got an micro SD adapter so the micro SD can load into the side of the Laptop . That makes it a lot easier to view and manipulate files on the micro SD.

[Clugh]

It's the least I can do for all your help in this thread! I'll talk to him and see what he says and let you know. I see him on the first of June.

Yall boys having a race? Where is it going to be? Do you have a link to the event. U only a week out. You need to get everything ready. U get your ESC yet? For me the XLX2 castle set up very easily with the Futaba 10px your radio will be the same. I don't want to confuse you but alot of time there is a update available for the radios have you checked yours out yet? you have a really nice radio btw but they have a lot of features that I don't even know how to use. The full manual is thick as a bible. But I have run the updates and started setting up a 6 axis gyro for power trim. Also I have the GPS unit so I have to set all that up plus motor monitoring etc. Thats valuable tuning info so id like to have it all working with the telemetry. The Gps unit is not terribly expensive either. I also purchased the Futaba dongle that lets you drive the servos from your pc.

You may need to buy an SD card for your Tx. Does it have an SD port? If it does by a card for it.


Thanks for your time and patience
Hubert

[Clugh]

You're in luck. Check your PMs...He said it was okay to give you his number directly.

Thanks tremendously for this.

Hubert

[Aros]

You're in luck. Check your PMs...He said it was okay to give you his number directly.

[Aros]

It's the least I can do for all your help in this thread! I'll talk to him and see what he says and let you know. I see him on the first of June.

[Clugh]

Also could you ask Brian is he doing ABC props for the masses because if he is I have a couple SAW props here from James Schaefer he suggested Brian do for me. These may be some newer cuts from James. I dont have a contact for Brian and did not want to be too forward. I asked Lohring about it and he didn't reply so maybe Brian is not doing propellers for everybody? For the scales I plan to run ABC 1818's. If you have a contact Todd please dont post it here in the open forum unless you ask him first.


Its not fair if you can get one and I cant....

Yours Truly,
Hugh (NAMBA # 960)

[Clugh]

I dont see how it could be any simpler than this. You dont need anything but The male and female lead connectors. With a castle 6.5 or 8mm this configuration is pie. You cant short it until you close the circuit even if it were connected incorrectly. But how could you. If the connectors are identically connected to the batteries leads where positive is female and negative is male. The only way to short this would be to plug the battery packs into themselves and with ec8 thats still possible. I hope its clear from this sketch that you can see that's the only way you could have shorted this if the connectors were the same on each battery pack. If you have 4 packs you configure the other 2 the same way as this and then parallel the positives and negatives from the saddled packs into the inverter. If you sketch it out then you can see everything and how it should go. You can trust this diagram. Since this is what a castle comes with this is what i use if not the AMASS because if the off brand is a higher resistance then it bottlenecks the entire system. And again if you need me Im here. Send the packs and ill solder and label them for you in about 30 min. A day turn around. Im not looking for compensation I just want you straight when you hit the lake.


Castle 8mm

Regards
Hubert

[Clugh]

This can accomplish these large solder connections. Leponitt 100 watt iron and rheostat. Kester silver solder with no clean flux.

[Clugh]

...

[Aros]

YIKES Hugh!! Yeah I know they can be incredibly dangerous and quite frankly I am amazed that was the first time it's ever happened to me, but I have always used connectors like EC3/EC5/XT60/XT90, etc, so it's hard to plug those in wrong. I did have a LiPo catch fire years back after a bad crash. We had an extinguisher luckily.

[Hugh Wiedman]

So THIS happened.

I was trying to figure out what could possibly be wrong with my setup. I had a well known man in the RC hydro community solder me a setup that should have worked. He preferred an 8mm bullet setup (I prefer connectors that plug easily together which I am used to in model aircraft like EC5, XT90 etc). I didn’t like the multiple positive and negative wires all over the place be he insisted that was normal for hydros.

So I decided in my infinite wisdom to try again on my own and plug everything together and mess with the radio settings.

I noticed there were two leads coming out of the ESC. One for throttle and the other for SBUS. Since I am a Spektrum guy, I didn’t know much about SBUS other than I heard you can program everything with just that lead into the RX.

I plugged the SBUS lead into the SBUS port and thought that would be the difference.

Whoops.

When I went to plug the final cables together for series I heard a massive POP!! Followed by this giant bright circle of light the size of a volleyball so bright it looked like a welder’s arc.

I thought it was my last moment on earth. My fiance heard it all the way upstairs and came running. I was in a momentary state of shock. My fingers were burned and blackened.

It was a scary and humbling experience.

So I have ordered new 4S 6000 batts, and the new ESC of course. I have someone who is going to solder EC8s all the way around. No more stand alone wires. Every main connection will be a EC8 connector so I literally can’t screw up the wiring.

I had to discard one brand new 4S 6000 as the explosion literally bore holes into it. The other one seems to be fine. I checked the cells and there are no irregularities.

A scary experience to be sure. I will never again put myself in a situation where I am unsure of an electrical setup. I am lucky. It could have been much much worse of an outcome.

Here’s some photos.

Holy Crap Todd!! You're lucky the thing didn't catch fire and burn everything to the ground. Lipos are incredibly dangerous, brought down a UPS 747 cargo plane in Saudi Arabia a while back when a load caught fire.

When I first started flying about 10 years ago I knew absolutely nothing about lipos (or much of anything else either) and an eflight pack started to puff so being the genius I am, I took a pin to deflate it. It immediately caught fire like a blow torch, belching out thick white smoke and flames. Burned my carpet in my hangar and I grabbed the wire cables and ran through the house holding it by the wires and threw it on my concrete garage floor. Took several hours to clear the smoke out of the house (after silencing all my fire alarms) and it even burned a hole in the concrete of the garage floor. Wish someone would have had a video of that complete moron running through his house hauling a pack belching smoke and fire!

[Clugh]

Wel I can accept the advice he gave you but I still dont know why anyone in electrics esp him would want double the resistance in a connector when there is not much difference in price. If it were allowed people in the sanctioning bodies would not have connectors at all to totally minimize voltage drop at the union. Think about it for a minute.....double the resistance for basically the same price. The way my AMASS are set up you cant plug the red into black because the sheathes are keyed differently. Red simply wont insert to black unless you make a serial plug with the right ends just for that.

[Aros]

The EC8s are anti spark as far as I know and Brian specifically recommended them. Most importantly I don’t need to wonder what black or red cable plugs into what. You can’t misunderstand these types of connectors. One connector from the ESC plugs into the series adapter which plugs into the two LiPos. Easy peasy as it should be.