Why not build it?

Crash, tumble and roll

2005-02-19T22:11:00.000-08:00

That's pretty much sums up todays racing. It was not clean racing, but more of a demolition derby, but lots of fun. The TC4 was rear ended at full throttle, propelling it into the air and tumble for 2 meters (5-6 feet). This was followed by me crashing into a pole and cracking the Ferrari front end. Was good racing at times, much closer this weekend and lots of heart stopping scary moments, unfortunately no clear winner. It's incredible to see the speeds of the race.

Anyway, the car didn't suffer any major structural damage after 1 crash into pole and 3 tumbles. I still need to inspect further the suspension arms. Suffered a few motor stalls, it seems the sensor harness might be loose, I'll have to check the brushless system. Also lost the rear-left back wheel, it completely stripped the Hex drive nut and wheel. It seems I didn't tighten the wheel nut and the loose wheel was grind away, only noticed this at the end of the day, should have suspected something was wrong when we heard strange grinding noises, which I thought was the body rubbing the wheel. So I started with a nice crack free and dent free ferrari 4wd and ended with a cracked and dented ferrari 3wd.

Relaxing Weekend

2005-02-14T00:08:00.000-08:00

Well, no racing this weekend, but it gave me time to play with the new laptop. The DVD playback in DVD mode (not booting into windows) is not too bad, I had some weird artifacts in one DVD but 3 other DVDs playback fine. I found I can play back 4.5 hours of DVDs before the battery low light comes on. For those that have this laptop, you must go into the DVD player options and tell it your screen is widescreen, for the DVD to playback correctly. The hardware DVD player, doesn't quite have as good a picture quality as the software DVD palyer like powerDVD. I guess the decoding and picture processing isn't as powerful in the embedded DVD player.

In windows, browsing internet via 802.11b and downloading files and stuff, the battery last for 2 hours and 40 minutes. Not great but not too bad for a laptop this size. I love the 15.4" widescreen, it's great for browsing web and all the apps look better with the wide look. Hope I can save up money to get 23" wide screen monitor some day, that would be great for flight simulators, too bad the RealFlight RC simulator doesn't support wide screen.

Also I spent virtually all weekend cleaning up PC hard drive, you can't believe the amount of files you accumulate on a 300GB drive. I spent most of Sunday burning DVDs to backup 100GB of files I don't use and are just wasting space on my drive.

Hobby wise, I had time to rebuild the HPI RS4 micro, this rebuilt was to reposition the battery to the center and lower in the chassis, I still have not found the right setup for the micro yet, I hope my latest changes will make it perform better. Didn't get enough time to take my custom TC4 apart to check the spur gear and pinion gear mesh, I had some weird noise from it during the race last week.

I was also tempted to start buying the brushless power system for my helicopter build. Towerhobbies has a $30 off $199, that's one of the biggest discounts I've seen from tower. It's perfect for the motor (http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXHEW2&P=7) and ESC (electronic speed controller) (http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXHYK6&P=7), I wanted to use for the heli. Though with a vacation coming up and the recent laptop purchase, I thought I better let the hole in my wallet (credit card) repair itself first.

Happy Chinese New Year

2005-02-08T13:50:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, it's the year of the Rooster and I'm happy the monkey (2004 was the year of the monkey) is off the back ;)

It has been a busy few days, I've bought a Averatec laptop (http://www.averatec.com/notebooks/6240series.htm) on Sunday from Compusa. The Compusa stores at Santa Clara have been very helpful. Like many of you are think, Averatec is a new name (backed by Korean company Trigem) and hence you kinda got to be worry about quality. But after going thru 3 of their laptop to find the right one, I'm happy with the purchase. Averatec has got to at the least improve their selection of an LCD screen vendor.. 3 machines I got had a dead pixel in the center region of the screen. The 4th I got had a dead pixel at the edge, so it's not as annoying. Compusa was helpful as they allowed me to exchange the machines and they have change their return policy to be a lot more Fry's like, i.e no restocking fee. So I was ok buying from them and this experience has been good and I have no issue buy from Compusa in the future.

As to the laptop, it's a interesting machine, it's built as a DVD player and a laptop. Unlike the HP DV1000 series which has a linux partition that the DV1000 boots into to do the "instant On" and play DVDs and mp3. This laptop has a separate circuit for DVD player and is truely instant on, it's like turning on the home DVD player. No waste of a linux partition, just a fully embedded DVD player using the laptop screen. This gives them the advantage of 7 hours of DVD playback on a single charge. Good innovative idea, simple and logical, something the bigger guys in the business are not doing. The other thing about the Averatec is price, for $999.99 you get a Athlon 64 Mobile with 15.4" widescreen, 512MB Ram, 60GB HDD, 802.11B/G wireless and DVD+/-RW burner, bad graphics subsystem, definitely not a gaming laptops but great for everything else. A lot for the price and what's amazinging is the thickness, it's under 1.2" thick. The bigger PC brands have adopted the American dream.. "Big as Texas", have you seen the HPs and Dells with this kind of processor, they are 2" thick.

Before you say the thickness is needed due the heat of the processor.. think again, this laptop is actually cooler running then my old Omnibook 6000 (P3 800MHZ). I stress the CPU with virus scan running and playing DVD at the same time, cpu usuage is around at 65%-80% (lots of zip files on the drive that requires extra CPU to unzip and then scan). So fatter machine only means it's cheaper to make, don't have to design properly, just throw everything in as the case is big enough to hold it all.

Happy Chinese New Year!!!

2005-02-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

This is the Ferrari body I used on the car, it's a F360. The car I built had a few good races today, it handled a lot better then the TC3. The power system used were Novak Brushless SS5800. The other car also had the same motor, this one was able to control the power and handled much better.

2005-02-01T01:31:00.000-08:00

This is the micro helicopter I fly indoors, the blue thing is a 12" ruler to give you a reference of the size and the grey box is the remote.

2005-02-01T01:26:00.000-08:00

All parts assembled and the car is ready to run. Upper deck provided both chassis support and also a good location for fan mount and antenna mount.

2005-02-01T01:24:00.000-08:00

All the chassis parts that I handcrafted.

Almost done

2005-01-27T22:32:00.000-08:00

Been busy working on the extra parts of the chassis and finally finish cutting them all out and drill all the holes. The extra parts are:

1. Chassis brace upfront (using the standard TC4 braces)
2. Rear brace, had to build these myself to fit the narrow chassis
3. Upper brace, this is built to add strength to the chassis length wise
4. Front bumper brace, a litle piece of carbon fiber to hold down the bumper
5. Battery brace, carbon fiber piece to hold the battery down.

Will post photos of the finished product soon.

2005-01-23T22:45:00.000-08:00

The parts put together with the some of the drivetrain and suspension.

2005-01-23T22:41:00.000-08:00

Carbon fiber chassis parts I built so far

2005-01-23T13:16:00.000-08:00

The custom TC4 I've been working on, is mainly around the chassis. I've built a custom chassis that is very narrow and slightly shorter, specs below:

Wheelbase: 250mm
Track width: 190mm
Chassis length: 300mm
Chassis width: 106mm
Chassis thickness: 3.4mm 100% Carbon fiber (Made of 2 layers of 1.7mm, top layer has cut-outs for servo, motor, battery - allow lower center of gravity)
Overall length: 345mm
Drivetrain: TC4/TC3 differentials
Main Shaft: Tamiya TT-01 Aluminium (allows the 10mm shorter wheelbase)
Steering: TC4 bell crank style steering

Background

2005-01-21T15:35:00.000-08:00

Well it's the first post and I think it's a good idea to offer some background to give people a better idea of where this blog is going.

I plan to start posting information about my present hobby project, which is around building a custom remote control electric 1/10th scale car. In this project I decided to build my own car chassis out of carbon fiber. The car uses a majority of Team Associated TC4 suspension and drivetrain parts. As it's custom I was able to also make use of some other parts I have and created a car that has a slightly shorter wheelbase as compared to the TC4. This made it perfect for the tight and small tracks I run on.

Other things I'll posts are modification made to:

HPI micro RS4 car, this is a 1/18th scale car, so it's very small.
Micro electric helicopter (Century hummingbird v3)
Electric conversion and build of a 0.30 size helicopter (Century Hawk Sport) - plan for a brushless electric motor vs the 0.30 glow engines.
Might cover some computer related builds, plans for a media center and some movie making tips and tools I use to create some movies I hope I can post on the blog.
Lots more as time goes on..

My hope is that the information I provide during the blog can inspire people to start thinking about building and creating something that they want and to explore and have fun. It doesn't hurt to buy things if you have the money, but for me half of the fun of any hobby is in the satisfaction of designing and building and then seeing your creation work. A bonus is when it works even better then anything you can buy and if it doesn't work, you can always redesign and rebuild to improve it.