The goal here I guess is to create some form of German army M41-G out of my HL M41A3. It won't be perfect, but Im sure I'll create something that is close enough to keep myself happy.
I started with a basic airsoft, non-Smoke and Sound HL M41. I stripped it down into its component parts and in the process broke a shock absorber from the suspension. No great problem as I managed to source a replacement. I plan on replacing the tracks with metal tracks and I guess that means replacing/upgrading a lot of the associated parts to cope with the extra forces involved with the new tracks. In that regard she's also getting steel gearboxes, drive sprockets and while I am at it I may as well prepare for the future and install a track tensioner.
On Wednesday I caught up with Kevin and collected a bunch of new electric goodies. I'm switching to 2.4ghz via the RC2HL and 9X, and am also putting a Mako into the system to pave the way for the IR battles which I know is only a matter of time (should also disable the track recoil nicely too).
Kevin's demonstrations cleared a lot of things up for me and gave me a few new ideas.
As is always the case, 2 steps forward and 1 step back. It seems my RX18 has packed it in. At least, I think its the RX18. The problem is that as you move the throttle lever, the motor pinions start to move, just enough to take up any slack in the gears and then stop, The motor starts whining, but not doing much more until the throttle is extended fully, given a bit of a wiggle, or you stick your fingers in and give the gears a bit of a nudge, at which point the motor/gears start to turn as expected. Its much like the motors are lacking the torque to get things to start moving. But it only happens intermittantly, as occasionally everything operates as expected the moment the throttle is moved.
After messing about with things for a while, as soon as the power was switched on the motor connected to the right side connector would just spin at full speed, and upon checking the RX 18 for dodgy connections I can see a little tiny scorch mark on a part of it...I guess that answers that.
That leaves the question of whether the RX 18 was also to blame for the prior issue with the motors stalling out? I am guess that yes it does, and my letting it happen while I worked on the problem probably caused them to pull too much power leading to the second problem with the visible scorch mark on top.
I am off to Melbourne for a week tomorrow, so when I get back I will replace the burned out rX18 and hopefully everything will be...wait for it...'back on track' (hehehe), unless anyone has another suggestion?
I have started a lot of the cosmetic modifications to the body too, such as building the smoke dischargers, creating the mantlet cover, weld lines, barrel mods for the servo recoil, etc but I might put that in a second post when I get some more photos of all that stuff.
JanStatistics: Posted by Jan — Fri Feb 01, 2013 12:46 pm
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