Halifax Electric Flyers Association

Smaller crowd at SP this morning, due in part to the activities at the Windsor field. While flying my favorite plane - with likely well over 1000 flights since 2013 - and actually speaking of the accolades of the Visionaire at the time - I hear a "pop" across the field and no motor power is available. I glide it in for a landing and confirm that the motor is not operational.

I am fortunate to have a Scorpion Battery Backup in the plane.... in turning this OFF all control is gone... no control surfaces and no motor. I turn the Scorpion back ON and voila - there are my surfaces again and still no motor. Scorpion OFF and the plane is dead. I measure the battery voltage - lots of juice left. My conclusion is that both the ESC and integrated BEC have failed. I am sure that if I hadn't had the Scorpion, that the plane would have hit the ground out of control.

So.... I wanted to share my experience. Highly recommended. These have a 2S battery that provides 5VDC to the receiver / surfaces in the event of a BEC malfunction. Again - this saved my plane.

These have been available at RotorQuest (https://www.rotorquest.com/scorpion-pow ... ckup-Guard) or GreatHobbies in the past. I expect that Geoff at MSC could also get them in....!

Now to do some more troubleshooting and replacement of the ESC in time for tomorrow morning....!!!!

Brian

Well.... it turns out that the problem was one of the simplest possible... the 40A ESC has a EC3 connector and my batteries are XT60... so I have an adapter between the two. The wire on the +ive lead had broken off...

In hindsight, I should have checked that prior to removing the front end of the plane!!!

Still... the Scorpion saves the day!

I had mentioned the strengths of this little device to some of our members and had promised to share a link.... this is a fantastic little tool that will supplement the 5VDC to the receiver and servos should the BEC or main battery fail. No motor - but at least we still have control surfaces which - depending on the plane - can allow it to gracefully land.

This is still listed as for sale on the Rotorquest website. I expect that MSC might be able to get these in as well.... but I haven't yet inquired.

https://www.rotorquest.com/Scorpion-Bac ... ion&page=2

Brian

Here is another link for the Scorpion Backup... https://www.amainhobbies.com/search?s=scorpion+backup

I have one coming from "Amain Hobbies" because I destroyed one two weeks ago by not shutting it off, and letting the internal lipo pack run down so low that it refused to work even after a slow charge.

It happened this way: Because I was not wanting to remove the wing on my Ultra Stick to access the actual mini shut off switch on the Backup unit, I ran the power from the unit through an OFF/ON switch on the side of the fuselage; this worked fine for a normal trip to the flying field. At the end of the day I removed the wing and put everything away in the hangar, forgetting that the switch was still "ON" in the unit; so that overnight and a day later it had time to discharge to virtually no volts on one of the two 500mah cells. I did attempt to replace the 2S unit with other 2S cells, that were ok...but that did not work out as the tabs on these little cells are delicate and they get soldered to a mini printed circuit board. The best solution was to bite the bullet, learn from my mistake and order another unit before they get discontinued. I like to keep two of these units because they are great insurance against losing several hundred dollars with the complete destruction of an RC plane, especially as one starts flying larger models.