ok, the pack finally balanced.. 5 hours and 45 minutes later..

Wow, now thats a long time to wait, lol.

One question, yesterday I ordered a Truerc 4s2p 8000 pack, and the day before, I ordered a Hyperion charger and balancer. Are the taps from the Truerc pack compatible with the hyperion taps? Or will I have to change them on the battery?

Thanks.

It depends on what taps you ordered on the Truerc pack. He usually uses the Hyperion taps, unless you specify otherwise. Mine came with ThunderPower taps.

The longest any of my packs balance is for a few seconds during the charge. If you have to let you pack balance for that long, one (or more) or the cells are damaged and is not taking as much of a charge as the rest of the cells. Passive balancing discharges at a very low rate, so it takes a long time to balance cells. The more out of balance the cells are, the longer it takes. You should use a DMM and measure the voltage of the individual cells as soon as the charging process is complete to see just how out of balance the cells are.

I just ordered it with deans and thats it. I didn't specify a certain tap. Hopefully it comes with a Hyperion tap though.

what kind of balancer are you using?

I have had some take a while too. I just plug them in and leave them overnight, then unplug them in the morning so I'm not sure how long they actually took to balance. I tend to see more imbalance in the TrueRC packs when they are pushed very hard. They are only 10-12C constant packs anyway. I have just gotten in the habbit of balanceing them at the end of the day every time I run them. The higher priced / higher C rated packs tend to stay balanced better but thats the trade off for the lower price IMO.

I use a Hyperion LBA6 and an Apache 505 to do my off line bablancing and it seems to me that the Apache does a faster job and when its done the cells are perfectly balanced. The LBA6 leaves some small (very) vaience still according to my volt meter. And the Apache was alot cheaper too.

Send him an email and verify. Thats one of those PITA things if its not right. Conversion plugs and all kinds of extra junk is needed then. These things are confusiong enough without all that too.

I'm using 505's as well. almost makes me want to sell my 109's so I can balance while charging.. and i have access to a DMM at work, but don't have the money for a personal one right now, vacation's less than a week away for me, so I'm scrounging for money lol

the good pack charged in:
55:35
2.614Ah
21.00v

the pack I had trouble balancing:
59:39
2.855Ah
21.00v

odd thing is.. in the bad pack, cell 2 was lower voltage than the rest last night.. I just took it off the charger, and cell 2 is HIGHER than all the other cells, and has been discharging for about 20 minutes now..

Well Brian's speed calc calculated ~43mph with 18/46 gearing.. just got back from some bashing, and I did a 44.9mph, and then second pass was 45.3mph very satisfied.
nothing was more than warm, like usual. One thing that happened, that's only happened to me maybe twice since I've been running brushless.. I never use reverse, for fear of shredding my drivetrain (warrior's had no delay between reverse and brake I believe..) the truck was going, spun out, and was rolling a little bit in reverse.. I gave it a little throttle to get it moving forward, and instead it accellerated in reverse. With this gearing, it also has a slight cog when starting low throttle from a dead stop. after it's rolling at say 2mph, control is flawless. I also tried jumping it.. I haven't jumped an RC in.. 4 years maybe? so of course it was a bad ending. too much throttle, and it flew like a fat pig, landing on the right rear tire.. broke the plastic rear suspension pin holder. I also broke both of the rear shock ends, and sheered both front body posts off from flipping it too many times under acceleration on pavement. need to lower the exp. some more.

I'll have video up sometime later tonight. I'm hoping Tower gets me the new rear holder before Thursday, because I'm heading up north for vacation, and would love to run in the north woods :)

i know it's a triple post, but bump.

18/46
http://a4dtm.com/lsp/park.avi (27.9mb divx)

or wait for it to show up on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=A4DTM

Looks pretty quick. Definitely held the throttle a bit long on that last jump though ;)
Did you have any problems with temps with that gearing?

no problems w/ temps at all. fans and heatsinks REALLY help a ton.

BAD news..
with all the problems w/ that battery pack.. after my last run (the park video), I hadn't touched the packs until tonight, when I hooked up the balancers, to balance before re-charging them..
one was in balance immediately, while the other (same pack I've had problems w/) blinked "check/err"..
just checked voltages, and they were:
3.7
3.7
3.7
1.8
3.7

:'(
I'm writing up an email right now to True-RC, and see what they can do to replace the bad cell. I'm going on vacation tommorow, which sucks because I was hoping to take the truck up with me, and also, I'll have to wait till I'm back to even send the pack in. Now, the cells at 1.8v, I'm not sure if it's still dropping, or if it has been 1.8v since the last time I ran it.. if I'm gone for a few days, what are the odds that something will happen to the pack? it's been sitting for 3 days now, and there's no puffing or anything like that.. I'm just worried, if it's slowly dropping voltage that something could happen to the pack while I'm away?
just put it in a firesafe, and hope it's ok?

It should be fine. The problem will happen when you try to charge the damaged cell.

yeah I hooked it up to the charger at 0amps, just to quickly check the voltage, saw that the total voltage wasn't too high, or too low, and disconnected the pack.. got home from work, and went to a friends house to use his DMM, and was struck w/ the sad news :(
it's sitting in my lipo sack on my desk at the moment, and I guess I'll have to wait a week to see what Dan says about replacing the cell.