Ok, so I just got off with Brian at SMC a little while ago and needless to say, it was a very enlightening and professional conversation. I started to speak with him in regards to my problem with my SportMax 6000mAh 28C batteries I purchased at the end of April of this year.

I will relay as much of the conversation as I can accurately remember as the conversation went on for nearly 20 minutes. After stating the above info about myself to Brian, the conversation goes:

Brian: Is this Freezebyte?

Me: Yes it is

Brian: Ah ok, now I know who you are, my names Brian of SMC Racing products and I saw your post on the web

Me: Ah ok, I was wanting to call you about this problem with my Lipos as I didn't hear back from you on the email

Brian: Oh? Hmm I didn't get it, what email did you send it to?

Me: Your on you main website contact info, info@smc-racing.com

Brian: Ahh, that actually goes our our president up in Canada whos is pretty busy and it sometimes takes awhile for him to get back to emails. If you wish to contact me directly, my direct email is jacoprod@aol.com. That was the email I sent to you from our past conversation when you had your first initial problem with the Lipos'

Me: Ah yes, I do remember those but I lost them in a recent computer crash and I couldn't remember it

Brian: No worries, so what exactly has been going on?

Me: Well, I think I bit the farm and its pretty much my fault. My lipos from you guys puffed big time when I was running my newly rebuilt Savage Flux on a grassy area testing out the new tires and body

Brian: Right, I remember seeing your pictures and I saw nothing out of the ordinary on you setup and the grass certainly didn't seem that high or thick

Me: That was my impression, but needless to say, now i've got my Lipos damaged that I paid good money for and im still not exactly sure what happened and its fustrating.

Brian: I can definentely understand. Were you running them past the stock LVC from HPI? We personally have never used the castle link on our HPI products, we deam them just fine out of the box and never mess around with the settings and have had hardly any issues with our products in there vehicles.

Me: Yeah, I changed the LVC from 3.1v to 3.3v at random times as I was getting a bunch of different opinions in regards which would be the safest setting. Some people state the LVC is an emergency backup only and shouldn't be used to determine when to stop running the vehicle, only when the speed and power drops drastically is when you want to stop driving.

Brian: Yes and no. Again, we have our Savage Fluxs on stock LVC from the factory and haven't had issues though when know as soon as the truck starts to kick and stop when you hit the throttle, we stop driving it as thats the LVC kicking in.

Me: Yeah, I unfortuantly pushed that envelope a little to far over a month ago and I think thats what caused my first little Lipo puffing in the first place and from recent info from peeps on the web, apparently if you have the LVC set to low, like 3.2v or lower, it tends to spike below that at times and causes slight damaged to the Lipo and over time, it gets worse and worse and the battery fails.

Brian: Well, very possible and yeah, pushing the Lipos past the saftey voltage which we deam around 6.0v will start to cause over discharging and puffing of the Lipos

Me: Yeah, I was being stubborn at the time and I guess once I slightly damaged the Lipo from my first incident an if the the voltages drops with the LVC are true, then I guess it was just a matter of time before they failed.

Brian: It sounds that way and I will be honest, the current batch of the 6000mAh Lipo's have been having problems handing low and high temperatures, especially down in Florida, were I've seen a large problem with puffing of Lipo's due to the heat

Me: Oh really?

Brian: Yeah, we are currently underway in producing more robust cells that will be able to take low and high temperatures better and hope to have them out soon. But we back up our products and I definently appreciate your honesty in regards to damaging the Lipos and we have no problem with replacing your Lipo's at the 50% cost rate.

Me: Awesome, thanks so much! I've just been so fustrated as this is my first brushless Lipo powered RC vehicle so its been a bit of a learning curve and fustrating at times because so many people have their own opinions and experiences about products

Brian: Yeah, some people think they just know everything and unfortuantely thats the tough part about getting info on the web, its hard to sort out the good from the bad. We try to visit the forums when we can, but this is just a two man operation here, so we keep pretty busy but also try to take care of our customers the best we can and we will take care of you.

Me: Yeah, I agree and I thank you again for your understanding and wanting to help me with. I've heard about SMC's customer service and I gladly say I can see where it comes from.

Brian: We appreciate that and we appreciate your honesty and always wanna support our customers and our products, even if some people will tend to blame us rather then their own faults

Me: Yeah, I wanna apologize if you got the impression that I was trying to start a flame war in regards to this issue and lay all the blame on you guys which was not my intent, I just had so many different "opinions" on what went wrong and who or what was at fault, I just wanted to get my facts straight, but in the end, I shoulda just called you directly

Brian: Yeah, again the web can be a good place for information, if you can sort through all the crap and personal biased. Feel free to contact us at any time with any questions either via email or phone and we will help you as best we can. I've been doing this for around 15 years and I''ve seen people do some really strange and stupid stuff at the race track. This company was orginally built to make products for racing R/C cars but lately, the direction of the market has been going to people just wanting to bash and have fun rather then racing, so were in a bit of a transition state, racing isn't as big as it used to be.

Me: Ok, so what do I need to do to get my replacement batteries a pay for the offset cost?

Brian: Well, don't rule out completely that you may not get your money back, as we will send them to the manufacturer and they can tell exactly what happened to the Lipo and if it was for some reason a factory defect, we will reimburse your money, so don't give up quit yet. They may find something wrong with the packs, they are really good about that.

Me: Oh ok, but I have a feeling it was pretty much due to me.

Brian: Understandable and again, thank you again for your honesty, we really do appreciate that and have no hesitation in replacing your batteries. We all make mistakes and i've made my fair share, i've fried and destroyed several ESC's and batteries over the course of this hobby, so im not immune to it either. I'm sorry you have to shell out more money then you already have. We will have our replacement upgrades for this Lipo's in the near future so whenever you get around to shipping them back to us, let me know via phone or email and I will set aside two of them for you.

Me: Well thank you very much Brian, I very much appreciate that. I guess in the end its just down to live and learn from your mistakes, even the expensive ones.