A Sad day for me...
I'm finally retiring my first FT plane, the Sea Duck.
I went to fly her the other day, and discovered that it wasn't binding properly. So I performed surgery to get to where I had the receiver, re-did the bind, and then found my ESCs weren't zeroing out and the prop on one side was spinning at low RPMs when I armed it, while the other wasn't. When I tried to reset them, I bungled the ESC programming.
I tried to replace them with known good ESCs until I could get these reprogrammed correctly, and that's when I noticed that the firewalls were coming unglued from the power pods and the wing was starting to heavily sag on one side. Apparently, Southern California heat does not bode well for hot glue and foam board.
So...I'm going to turn it into a "Flight of the Phoenix" type of thing - resurrecting electronics from it to use in rebuilding the Sea Duck out of DTFB, instead of a speed build kit. The new one, I'll give it the proper livery colors and Minwax finish to get it waterproofed.
It's kind of a sad thing, but she will be reborn. At least she never crashed!
I'm finally retiring my first FT plane, the Sea Duck.
I went to fly her the other day, and discovered that it wasn't binding properly. So I performed surgery to get to where I had the receiver, re-did the bind, and then found my ESCs weren't zeroing out and the prop on one side was spinning at low RPMs when I armed it, while the other wasn't. When I tried to reset them, I bungled the ESC programming.
I tried to replace them with known good ESCs until I could get these reprogrammed correctly, and that's when I noticed that the firewalls were coming unglued from the power pods and the wing was starting to heavily sag on one side. Apparently, Southern California heat does not bode well for hot glue and foam board.
So...I'm going to turn it into a "Flight of the Phoenix" type of thing - resurrecting electronics from it to use in rebuilding the Sea Duck out of DTFB, instead of a speed build kit. The new one, I'll give it the proper livery colors and Minwax finish to get it waterproofed.
It's kind of a sad thing, but she will be reborn. At least she never crashed!