Sunday 16 November 2008

Winter break

I took the new tyres out for a spin today. They're a gazillion times (at least) better than the stock ones. The Goose bumps clog up a bit more than the Step-pin ProLines, but they stay way grippy, and the Edge ones on the front are loads more incisive.

Overall, they're great, offer loads more grip - I'm well pleased with them. The HPI dish wheels look the part too.

The track is now getting really wet - the part of the field it's on is quite damp and never really dries out over the winter, so today may have been the last run there for a while. I can now get on with seeking out a club...

Tyres, wheels etc

I received this morning a big box of tyres, wheels and stuff. Have now some new tyres to try out - specifically :

The blade will probably not be much use until spring now - but I'm looking forward to trying out the rest.

Tuesday 11 November 2008

More telemetry

Well, I finally got that last part of the telemetry fitted - the rpm sensor. You can see that the sensor fits just fine inside the spur/pinion cover - and once I found the right place for it with double-sided sticky, it was held in place by a little screw. The wires route out via the cover that's used to adjust the slipper. Quite neat, and I'm altogether pretty pleased.



For completeness, here's a shot of the aluminium mount I made for the lap-timing trigger..



.. and the new receiver (which is a lot bigger and heavier than the more modern one that the telemetry system doesn't work with :(( ) and the telemetry box itself :



Wires, wires everywhere. I'll tidy them up a bit now I'm happy it's all working, but some of them really are only just long enough, so getting them tidier may be tricky.

Back up to a 15T pinion too today, and broke my lap record for the farming (now stands at 24.8 secs - should be able to get a sub 20 sec in good conditions and once I've l2drive). Mostly because the conditions were much better (less sticky).

The temp sensor is great, the voltage sensor is pretty useful and the rpm sensor is, well, fun. It measures spur speed, but of course, you only need to tweak the throttle whilst you're airborn and you get a crazy high max speed reading :/ It'd be useful if you have a pit guy to keep an eye on the telemetry real time, but apart from that, it's not the most useful bit of the kit. There were many reviews of the Spektrum telemetry stuff which slated it - but it is actually quite a good setup - you can get them on the internet for far less than the Novek Data sentry stuff, and the voltage and temp are really quite useful. The rpm sensor could be a pain to mount (I guess it depends a lot on the car) but on the e-firestorm it's really quite straightforward if you can drill a hole straight and are willing to spend 15 mins or so getting the stuff in exactly the right position.