In support of Eric, the Nitroplanes CS Guy

I posted this on RCDiscuss in the Nitroplanes CS forum after reading some nasty posts from customers.

SUBJ: Thanks, Eric, for doing a job that must suck (the rest of us, chill...)

At the risk of sounding like a Nitroplanes/xheli/hobbypartz/nitroplanes evangelist, I hope you will take a moment to think about my comments here.

I was thinking as I was reading some of these CS request posts about how frustrated we pilots get when things don't go as planned. I expect things not to go quite as well as I wished, but add to that the difficulty getting through to CS described and experienced by many of us, and it gets hard sometimes to be patient. I read comments by users that I hope would never occur face-to-face, taking out their frustrations out on Eric, and it annoys the hell out of me.

Eric is a guy just like us, who goes to work and does his job, one I have no idea why anyone whould choose. I am sure, like the rest of us, there are days he has his A game, and days when he brings his B game. I am sure he does what he can for us. I am also pretty sure he wishes there were more of him, (assuming he is really one guy, and not a bunch of people at NP under the same name). His job is to get to as many of us as he can, and to try to do right by us. We will tell him our troubles, give him good and worthless info about our problems, and expect him to move the world for us. Some of us will lie to him, abuse him and his company, rob from them and rarely thank them when they come through. Some of us blow things up, burn them out, and find other ways of abusing their products, and expect them to compensate us. Some of us have expectations that can never be met, even if he was the owner of the company. And yes, every now and then he or one of his "minions" screws up. And yes, sometimes we get the short end of the stick, usually through no fault of his. But more often than not, Nitroplanes comes through when our concerns are valid, our expectations appropriate, and the info we provide useful to solving the problem. He doesn't have any control over most of the things that piss us off. The customer isn't always right, and I have never seen Eric treat us the way some of us treat him. While we would like it to be, its not all about just you, its about all of us, waiting our turns. Please keep these things in mind when you work with CS.

Put your order number in your email. Sends pics, vid, whatever will make it easier for him to help you. It can be a PITA, but if you want quick results, get him what he needs to help you. Realize how many CS requests he gets (I understand, not our problem, but really, if you want much higher prices they'll be glad to hire more people), and wait your turn. If he misses your email, send him a kind bump.

Thanks Eric, for doing what you can and not going postal on us. You have helped many more of us than have missed out getting what we need, and I for one appreciate it. Sorry you job sucks, but man, "choose your rate, choose your fate".  I just hope you are an RC pilot too, and can fly off that stress!

BZ

Stearman Emerges

I finished the Stearman, completely, this afternoon. She is beautiful... And sounds so sweet running up. I look forward to the day I get to fly her!

The HeadsUpRC motor is a thing to behold. Quiet, powerful, sweet! Installed the AR500 and bound her to my Dx6i. I love it when everything comes together! Here running her under 1/3 throttle to make sure it stays together and nothing overheats.

The battery compartment, the AR500, and the elevator/rudder servos.

Prop on, all finished!

And with her friends in the hangar!

I have been flying the E-flite Stearman on the Phoenix flight sim. She is much harder to fly there than I suspect she is in real. On the sim she has very high wing loading, glides like a brick, and is very, very twitchy, even with a 50% dual rate and 30% expo. She is nearly impossible to maneuver on the ground. I have a feeling that is not what she is like in real life, from the videos I have seen on YouTube.

It remains stormy, and I fear tomorrow and the weekend may be a bust too... More sim...

Another One Just Like The First One...

The stock "ExceedRC" generic ESC in the Cubby is a POS... The first one burned out after a few flights while tuning Cubby up on the bench (see below, Feb 24, 2011). Nitroplanes sent me a new one, and it arrived yesterday. They provided great customer service for this issue, but I wonder what they will do now. I had a bad feeling about the stock ESC and had purchased a ExceedRC Proton 30A ESC from hobbypartz in anticipation of this failure... And it did fail. Here's the vid:

I plugged it in and it got hot fast... I unplugged it, and got Aidan to video a second try in case something exciting happened. It just got wicked hot and started to smell, so I unplugged it before it burst into flames. These are bad ESCs.

Looking forward to flying her tomorrow! Wonder if the gyro, dual rates and more confidence will come together for a great flying day?  Up late charging her batteries... never sleep on a charging LiPo.

Frankenheli Gets Her Blades!

Frankenheli remains a bit of a hangar queen. Her blades came in, and I put them on tonight. I had removed the chintzy GY192, and put it in the Cubby (we'll see how that works tomorrow). I am waiting for the HK mini-MEMS gyro (at an amazing $10) to come back in stock and be shipped to me. I'll be putting one of them on Franky. Today I thought the AR6100e I had in the Cubby had burned out (it didn't, but that's another story, video above). Before I realized it was just low voltage that kept it from lighting up, I had removed it and taken Franky's Orange receiver and satellite receiver, and put them in the Cubby. So now Franky has the Spektrum AR6100e in her. Once the gyro comes in, we can spin her up and test her out!

The prop saver I ordered from HeadsUpRC arrived the other day. I'm a little tired of breaking props and motors that I decided to install a new motor and the prop saver. I have a new ExceedRC motor for the Cubby, but I won't install it unless I break the one in the Cubby now, its second motor.  Cubby is pretty beat up... My first plane. Looking forward to flying her and seeing how the gyro works out!

Hopefully tomorrow will be a good morning to fly. I had planned to meet up with a pilot at MCRCC's Bob Miller Field, but the winds were too brisk and we cancelled. I am excited about going out there this weekend, and plan to take Luke. 

The Backwards Motor

Well, something new everyday...

I received the HeadsUpRC 3542-10 ginormous motor, and its mounting hardware this afternoon, and set about installing it in the Stearman. I was baffled because they sent me the "wrong" motor mount. The holes in the motor did not line up with the holes in the mount. I emailed HURC and sent them these pics:

At a glance you can see the holes don't match up...

Can't tell so much from this pic, but I was making my point here...

And to make sure they didn't send the "wrong" mount again, I sent them a pic of the motor tag for good measure.

Rather quickly I received a polite email response with this pic attached from Jeff at HURC:

Its the picture from their website. Its not apparent at first, but Jeff's kind guidance points out what should be painfully obvious once I though about it. So much so that I had actually had test fit the parts in the right place trying to figure it out feeling that it was just wrong and set the idea aside right away. You can see a tip of the shaft sticking up from behind the motor mount, right up there by the motor wires. Note the wires coming out the back. Jeff pointed out the prop shaft assembly goes on the "back" of the motor, and the shaft faces out the rear... Really? Wouldn't you know that once I "shifted my paradigm" I had the thing together in 45 seconds.

There's the shaft, going out the back through the motor mount. (Its just wrong... so wrong...)

And here's the prop shaft and spinner coming off the back of the motor.

Here's my assembled motor, with a clear view of the shaft coming out of the back. Sort of a Hermaphrodite motor...

Installed on the Stearman and wired up, simply beautiful. A very nice motor. Can't put the cowl back on until I know which way the motor spins when powered up as I may need to reverse a couple wires. I don't have the Spektrum AR500 receiver yet anyway.

Kinda nice how things fit together when you do it right, even if it just looks wrong...

My Portable Charging Station

I decided I wanted a bit more LiPo fire safety, and transportability of my charging station since I am joining the Mississippi Coast RC Club (MCRCC) and will need a portable charging station. I had seen this idea on Helifreak done by tptomkins, and have been thinking about it ever since. I had seen a nice all steel toolbox, including a steel handle, at Harbor Freight for $30, and today I decided to make my own portable charging station, so I picked one up. It came out really great and took only an hour or so not counting waiting for paint to dry.

The Harbor Freight steel toolbox that became my portable charging station, on top of my Craftsman 3 door storage cabinet. Nice combo! Labels were made using a Brother P-Touch PT-2430PC label printer.

The steel top pull-out handled drawer holds the P350 Power Supply and my iCharger 208B (from ProgressiveRC), velcroed in using 3M Dupont Dual Lock "velcro". My Hobby King battery voltage monitor is regular velcroed next to the charger so I know where it is. There are two storage compartments separated from the center part where I store the connecting harnesses (parallel multicharger harnesses and the multi-balance harnesses, also from ProgressiveRC), as well as an extra balance board in. I painted the area where I drilled the holes fluorescent orange and edged it with white electrical tape for a clean appearance. The drilling and grinding messed up the original paint a bit. I also think it just looks nicer. I like this design as should a LiPo ignite I can pop the leads, remove the top drawer saving my PSU and iCharger, close the box and chuck it or run away.

Close up of the work I did to make this shelf. I drilled four holes, two up close together, the two below a few cm apart, then Dremeled out the piece between to two farther spaced holes to fit the balance board lead using a reinforced cutting blade. I also Dremeled the resulting holes to make them more uniform and dull the edges using a grinding stone (deafeningly loud...). I filed then sanded the edges. To protect the wires from cutting I placed a thin lip of Liquid Tape rubber stuff to the edges (the greenish edge... didn't have red). To further protect the wires out of the charger I made an extension (see below), and from the connectors down far enough to pass through the holes I shrunk some yellow shrink wrap. To protect the balance board leads I Gooped in a piece of yellow fuel line I cut to fit and split down the middle to fold over the edge. Nice and clean appearing!

Here I've tilted the removable top drawer up so you can see the underside where the charger and balance leads come through. You can see the balance board attached with VHP tape to the underside of the drawer. I put the felt feet to keep the banging down...

LiPo Safe bag is stored in the bottom, and acts as a floor. I will transport batteries in this bottom section and will likely line it with rubber drawer non-skid for appearance, to dampen noise, and to keep the batteries from bouncing around. Discharged batteries will go in the LiPo safe bag and in the bottom compartment. Here you can see the EC5 single charge harness (I was discharging the battery) and the single JST-XH connector from the battery plugged into a ProgressiveRC multibalance harness for 3S batteries.

I love this set up and am pretty pleased with how it came out!

CHARGER EXTENSION

I made the charge lead extension using an extra Alligator Clip charger lead I had. You can see that under the rubber handle what is essentially a female banana connector pin that accepts the male banana plug.

The extra Alligator Clip charging cable.

This is a different, larger, Alligator clip from which I have removed the plastic handle so you can see the banana plug connector (forgot to take pics of the small one I made). The small one I use is the same, but smaller. I cut the Alligator clip off the wires. I used my Burnzomatic torch to melt the solder and remove the pin from the harness; it fell right out.  I then soldered the wires back onto their pins using the torch. If I had just melted the plug off the Alligator clip the solder in the pin cup would have melted and separated anyway, so this was a more controlled and easier way to do it.

I shrink wrapped the pins individually (red and black) and then used yellow shrink wrap to hold them together at the female end to prevent play and secure them. You can also see the yellow shrink wrap around the male pin ends to protect the wire as it passed through the steel drawer.

A close up of the female ends in their shrink wrap. Whichever charge harness I am using now plugs in here instead of directly to the charger.

Here's what the extension (right) looks like connected to an EC5 charge lead (left). I had made this lead previously, with a loose shrink wrap (black) holding the wires together. Everything fits nice and snug!

If you have any questions feel free to contact me!

Stearman Build Day #2 - almost done

Essentially finished the Stearman today. I need the motor and the receiver to complete the build. She is huge, and a thing of beauty.

Aileron servos setup, preparing the wing.

Servos in. I forgot to snap a pic of the install, but it went pretty much by the book.

Hinges in the aileron, preparing to join it to the wing.

I was worried about losing the aileron servos leads in the wing, so I used the string they provided for the install, just kept it tied to the plug, but ran the bitter end through the frame and tied it off. This part is in a hole in the frame so the string does not interfere with the wing install

.

Both wings done.

Pilot figure. I was going to make him a Kamikaze, but thought that might be a bit prophetic... Luke and my names on the cockpits since fling is becoming his thing too.

Finished, except for the motor and receiver!

She is fragile. It will be some time before I am ready to fly her. Want to work out my piloting bugs on the Alphs Sport 450 first. This plane is pretty big, not sure she is a park flyer, per se...