Soo time for a new episode of Bills Law strikes again...
Got motivated to do a complete rebuild of my RR5 Alien to get ready for the coming season. Even managed to get a few videos of the process which will get posted over time as I get a chance to review them and piece good parts together worthy of a look. Got it all set back up and pretty and decided to go out and remaiden it today at the local park.
Anyways, started charging batteries at ~3 am since I was up again. Kept busy binge watching Star Trek TNG while working on the FT3d to finish that up today. Got done charging batteries for the Alien and the Gremlin by noon and headed out to fly at the local park.
It was a nice sunny day not too warm but not super cold. The ground was starting to soften with the sunshine and I found a few squishy spots by the parking lot so decided to walk the street down to where I sit. Got all set up to dvr , did a quick test hover and turns and mild flips to make sure it would behave properly and sat down for some FPV.
I should have stopped right there as the first pack I learned that the AXII antenna I got was not so great where it was mounted. First I upped the VTX to 200 from 25 MW and that kind of helped I could at least get more then 30 feet or so away and face myself without total loss of video. Messed around like that and stayed real close for the warm up pack.
After that was done I decided I would cut the zip ties and relocate the antenna to see if that got better. It helped a little more but still not what I need or desire for video. I flew around and did short hops to get it re tuned better. The OSD makes for easy tuning on the MR. Steele PDB. I did have one panic attack as I did one last tweak at the end of the third pack and got the message in my goggles that there was no connection to the FC... Up shoots the heart rate... Bills Law again warning me to walk away while I still can.
Decided to at least see if the PDB was fried and tossed the 4th battery on. The pdb popped to life I could get into the osd and it saved things fine. Took off out over the field a bit further to test a few punch outs and see what TPA was doing and if I need to adjust I gains or anything like that.. ZOOM!!!1 up it goes and gets a bit wobbly as expected as TPA was defaulted and really high. turned on the apex of the punch out to start coming back to make changes and the video goes full static. Tried to yaw the quad and get it back and was a tad too late and it bounced of the ground and flipped over.
Time for the first walk of shame for 2018... the further I get out into the field the squishier it was getting since the sun has been on the open field all day. As I got closer to the quad I realized that it was NOT mud sticking to my shoes. Anyone care to guess what it is? Don't bother .. It was cow poop. The ENTIRE field had been covered in it at the end of sports season to winter in for spring... now me AND my shiny new rebuild quad are smack dab in the middle of it.
Needless to say the quad is no longer clean and shiny. I cleaned as much off the props as possible so it would not spray the electronics and make an even bigger mess. Bills Law stage two warning to just go home... I got the message at this point but decided to fly the quad back to where I was set up instead of carrying a poo covered quad. I set it on the ground and get ready for take off and was frustrated enough I was not paying attention and missed the balance connector and wires had got free of the main wires and was swingin free.
As soon as I hit arm and throttled up the balance connector got into the props and I heard that all too familiar "tink" as the connector was tossed off the wires. Normally the few times this has happened in the past the connector merely was chipped or split but never fully removed. This time however since the quad was covered in poo it was totally gone and the balance wires were now in the process of welding themselves to each other. I knew there was no way to get the battery out of the straps in time so I pulled the main connector out of the pdb and commenced to separating the balance wires before I ended up with an explosion or a fireball in my hand from a near full charged CHL 100 C battery.
Needless to say the Gremlin has not been flown today nor has the FT3d got its maiden. I am catching up on the forums and calling it a day and just curling into a ball and going back to TNG binge watching. Probably not even gonna attempt to cook tonight the way the day has gone.
Soooo how was yer day....