Looking for a buggy project

[BrianG]

Dragging this thread up to post a little update.

I was having troubles with the Quark ESC seeming to shut down occasionally. But by the time I walked over to see what was wrong, it would be ok. I was using a cheap $10 UBEC and thought it was overheating, so I removed the shrink wrap and added a heatsink to the IC, and then re-wrapped it in cable braiding (used mostly for computer cables) to aid in cooling. Seemed to be fine for a while, but then started to "reset" again. At that point I was really suspecting the Quark ESC despite temps being cool, so was gonna wait and get the MMM. Well, I recently got the CC BEC and decided to try it in the buggy. 'lo and behold, all problems went away! I'm only using one servo (Hitec 5945MG) so I didn't think the current would be that high, but it apparently was. Or, it could have been the switching noise resetting the receiver, I dunno. Bottom line, the cheapie UBECs might be good for 1/10 scale stuff with less servo draw, but not for the larger vehicles with stronger/multiple servos.

On a side note, I was playing around with the buggy in the yard yesterday and was having a ton of fun. I geared down to 46/12 to help runtime. I get about 50-55 minutes of runtime on my MA 4s 8Ah packs now and still have ~40mph speeds. However, about 35 minutes into the run, I was doing a high-speed run down the street showing off to the neighborhood kids when a car turned into the street. I jammed on the brakes and turned around to come back, but the car lacked any punch. Turned out I snapped the center shaft to the rear end! lol, gotta love BL power!

BTW: temps @ ~60*F ambient after the run were: ESC (~95*F), Motor (~87*F), batts (~95*F). I'm pretty satisfied!