More tweeking

Ok, I have discovered something that many of you Wild Hawk flyers may already know.  The foam hinges  on the tail are really stiff and really suck.  I found this out by testing my servos and noticing that the tail was flexing side to side with the rudder.

So now my next item is to cut the tail surfaces off and put in new hinges.  I don't know for sure yet what I will use for the hinge.  I am leaning to doing what we did for my Dad's plane.  When we put his plane together, we found that the rudder hinge had already broken.  We just used clear tape strips to put it back together.  It seems to work just great for him.

What ever I do, I will try to remember to provide pictures along with an update.

Almost forgot to give an update on another modification I have planned, home made LIPO battery pack.  I often have access to used laptop batteries.  These are usually packed with A size LIPO batteries.  Most are listed as some version of an 18650 3.7v ~2000mah battery.  All modern batteries of this type have internal fuses that blow to prevent damage to the devices they power.  So, quite often a bad laptop battery will only have 1 or 2 (usually two as they are used in parallel) bad cells.  So recently I collected several cells that I will put together to form 3, 3s 11.1v 2000mah battery packs.

This is a picture of the first series pack that I soldered together.  I ordered wires and connectors from All-Battery.com along with a basic balancing charger.  Once all the parts come in, I'll wire it up and submit more pictures.

I did some research into Lithium batteries and found that the are very particular with charging and must be handled very carefully.  I'll get into this more in a later post.

So, that's it for now.

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