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So what have you RC FAILed on today? Any RC related faux pas, injuries, past disasters?

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Today, I was working on a kit and I've already done the electronics a couple weeks ago. Everything was already working fine. And then today, I decided to test a few things, the car wouldn't move or turn. I could hear the ESC. Stumped me a bit. Then the ESC starts beeping. I couldn't figure it out and decided to maybe try a different receiver. Then I realized I was using the wrong transmitter! 

So my tip is, if you have multiple transmitters, make sure you pull out the right one before taking apart the electronics. Haha!

Anyone have had RC fails, disasters, or even RC related injuries? 

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My most commonly stupid issue (probably cos its so mundane and not actually a technical build step), is always forgetting to turn on the radio when i first turn on all electronics to center servo. Naturally i then attach the servo horn/saver, as simply hooking power to ESC with servo connected, will adjust the servo slightly. I then get everything positioned in chassis etc. only to then find my car is instantly at full lock left or right when i eventually turn her on for the first run, hahaha.

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I learned you don’t let your neighbor drive your brand new X-ray T1

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30 minutes ago, Ryz82 said:

My most commonly stupid issue is always forgetting to turn on the radio when i first turn on all electronics to center servo.

For me it’s forgetting to turn the radio off. 

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3 minutes ago, Shodog said:

I learned you don’t let your neighbor drive your brand new X-ray T1

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Now that's an impact. Wow! To sheer the carbon fiber plate like that, what did they hit ?

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i ran my kit before setting the steering endpoints, still a newb and the programming instructions were a bit difficult to figure out. took a week on on stand tests to figure it out.

running a kit/body shell that isnt reinforced at all and cracking a nice paint job albeit a minor crack.

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Finally got the bRat set up with a reliable, rebuilt and tuned up MSC mated to a peppy little 380 boat motor (and its homemade pinion sleeve), gave it full bearings throughout, and a new receiver to pair up with my Flysky Tx, so I thought I had solved all the problems and was carelessly drifting it around the basement last night until...

....one of the hex shafts rounded out inside the stub axle :(

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I tried to put a Vaterra V100 parts car on eBay tonight.........won’t let me put it up for sale until next month 🤦🏻

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OK I ll be the first to admit it ......    sometimes when installing a brand new high end (this only happens with expensive ones) brushless setup on a car I get the motor wires crossed .... turn everything on oblivious to the crossed wires and am constantly amazed  that the motor hardly spins at all so I generaly start swearing at it and give it full throttle to make it move. Usually there is a very funny sound and smoke comes out of the esc it is at that precise moment that I realise the motor wires are crossed and also that my son walks in asking if its ready yet.....  I have done this at least 2 times. I ll go and cry in a corner of my office now. 

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1 minute ago, t3garett said:

OK I ll be the first to admit it ......    sometimes when installing a brand new high end (this only happens with expensive ones) brushless setup on a car I get the motor wires crossed .... turn everything on oblivious to the crossed wires and am constantly amazed  that the motor hardly spins at all so I generaly start swearing at it and give it full throttle to make it move. Usually there is a very funny sound and smoke comes out of the esc it is at that precise moment that I realise the motor wires are crossed and also that my son walks in asking if its ready yet.....  I have done this at least 2 times. I ll go and cry in a corner of my office now. 

I’ve found that there are times it’s best to walk away for the night and try it again with fresh eyes.  I’ve had to do it with my R/C’s and Dad had to do that a couple  weeks ago with a system that allows him to work his bbq grill remotely with his iPhone and iPad. He was having a tough time getting the device to work on wifi and talk to his Apple devices and finally just gave up and tried it the next morning......and of course, it worked fine!

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Right now about 75% of everything I machine ends up with mistakes in it, or I make it correctly to find there's design flaws in it. Last week I made my 3rd underguard for my juggernaut 2 rebuild. On the first run after working on this for about 3 months one of the home made rear axle drive shafts let go (The loctite failed), and the steering was terrible with the rear steering locked out. So I've now got to dismember the rear axle and re-glue the drive shaft, then re-assemble the truck to see if I need to go back to 4 wheel steering. if I do then I'll be on to underguard number 4. Also the body mounts I made don't line up quite correctly so it looks like I'm going to have re-design and re-manufacture those as well. More and more I'm thinking about just giving up on this, as nothing seems to go right. Perhaps I'm just getting too old and my brain is too slow, or perhaps my enthusiasm for things is just waning. Having been in self imposed lockdown for months because of my health I haven't been able to run models anywhere but in the garden, and it gets a bit boring trundling round on flat lawn after a while..... 

 

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10 hours ago, Ryz82 said:

Now that's an impact. Wow! To sheer the carbon fiber plate like that, what did they hit ?

I was running the car in the street in front of my house. My neighbor Asked to drive it. A Ford Expedition comes driving down my street and because X-ray was coming towards us and controls are opposite , he turned it right into the path Instead of away from of the SUV which promptly crushed it. 

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built my trailer up , got to the last steps and realised id built it with the ally baseplate upside down :wacko: had it to strip and flip over

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I know this sounds terrible, but I'm glad it's not only me having fails--makes me feel better! haha. 

Oh, and if I "like" your fail post it doesn't mean I like that you failed. I just like that you posted :)

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Today I failed on these:

  • After going to remove a pinion on a motor I found that I'd stupidly used red thread lock (years ago) instead of blue on the grub screw and managed to twist an allen key trying to remove the damned thing. In the end it took my little gas powered blow torch to free it up.... this also required motor removal. So what should have taken 2 mins ended up taking an hour......
  • Walked the 1 mile down to the local rec ground to run my new Schumacher buggy in a postal racing attempt only to find that I had forgotten to glue the tyres to the wheels = first lap tyres ripped off wheels, had to go all the way home again after just 1 min run time to glue tyres and then go all way back to try again.

 

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1 hour ago, Wetman said:

built my trailer up , got to the last steps and realised id built it with the ally baseplate upside down :wacko: had it to strip and flip over

Done that with the semi truck box trailer. There is one hole for the manual legs that isnt symmetrical to all the other screw holes on the other side, and I missed it 🤦‍♂️

This was about 10 years ago and I remember approx 2am in the morning 😄

I've posted this before somewhere on here... but as a kid, I was soldering an rc car in my bedroom at my dads house, and went to hover my hand over the soldering iron to see if it was going/hot. Nope, look at the outlet, plugged in, switched on, thinking it was broken I grabbed the hot end of the iron as it was cold...

Took me holding the iron for what seemed like about 10 seconds, to realise I was getting an electric shock. 🤦‍♂️

 

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Just now, berman said:

Done that with the semi truck box trailer. There is one hole for the manual legs that isnt symmetrical to all the other screw holes on the other side, and I missed it 🤦‍♂️

This was about 10 years ago and I remember approx 2am in the morning 😄

I've posted this before somewhere on here... but as a kid, I was soldering an rc car in my bedroom at my dads house, and went to hover my hand over the soldering iron to see if it was going/hot. Nope, look at the outlet, plugged in, switched on, thinking it was broken I grabbed the hot end of the iron as it was cold...

Took me holding the iron for what seemed like about 10 seconds, to realise I was getting an electric shock. 🤦‍♂️

 

Thats the one. It was when i came to put the auto mechanism on for the legs i realised i`d put it upside down. A few well chosen naughtywords later and its right now

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13 hours ago, BJoe76 said:

I’ve found that there are times it’s best to walk away for the night and try it again with fresh eyes.  I’ve had to do it with my R/C’s and Dad had to do that a couple  weeks ago with a system that allows him to work his bbq grill remotely with his iPhone and iPad. He was having a tough time getting the device to work on wifi and talk to his Apple devices and finally just gave up and tried it the next morning......and of course, it worked fine!

Hang on! Can we go back to the BBQ grill remote working with the Iphone please. So what is all that about? Slap a burger on the BBQ, go back indoors when its cold and control the heat of the BBQ from the phone? 😀

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58 minutes ago, Oneball1971 said:

Hang on! Can we go back to the BBQ grill remote working with the Iphone please. So what is all that about? Slap a burger on the BBQ, go back indoors when its cold and control the heat of the BBQ from the phone? 😀

 

58 minutes ago, Oneball1971 said:

Hang on! Can we go back to the BBQ grill remote working with the Iphone please. So what is all that about? Slap a burger on the BBQ, go back indoors when its cold and control the heat of the BBQ from the phone? 😀

Pretty much, it’s a device that talks to a motor and vent that you install on the grill and you can set a temp range to work from and monitor the grill temps from in the climate controlled comfort of your house!  I have to check to see what it was called after work though, can’t remember who it was from right now.

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Go back 35 years or so and my first run of my brand-new, saved-up-for-12-months Super Champ. Dad drive me up to the local park, lots of wide open space. Off it goes, pretty quick (for the time) and I'm just getting the hang of it when it ... stops. Throttle does nothing, but I can see the front wheels still steer OK. On approaching the car I can smell something burning. The aerial (they used to be about 60cm long back then) had managed to wrap around one of real driveshafts, and jammed it. The smell of burning was the quirky mechanical speed controller the orignal Super Champ had thouroughly cooking itself to death. Run time had been about 1 minute, maybe 2.

Lessons learned: spare parts cost more pocket money (although Dad was nice and paid for a new SC); don't leave loose aerial outisde the aerial tube, tape the free end down securely.

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I started to heat shrink that extra wire to the antenna tubes then cap it off like normal to prevent that!

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I've had a few of these over the years, most already well-documented on here but I'll add them again for posterity: 

This was back when I had first left home, was in heaps of debt and had hardly any cash to spare for RC, but all my other NiMHs were on their last legs and I managed to scrimp up just enough to buy two cheap 2200mAh NiMHs from the LHS.  They had Tamiya connectors and my cars use Deans, so I figured I'd do the right thing and solder on Deans connectors straight away, instead of being lazy and using an adapter lead.  So I sat down at my workbench, grabbed the battery, grabbed the snips, put them across the battery leads and squeezed.  Battery got hot and blew the insulation off the far end.  Yes, I had tried to snip across both wires, with metal snips :faceplam:

So, I put that battery to one side, shaking my head in disbelief at my own utter stupidity, picked up the second battery and did exactly the same thing.

Another popular one would be driving all the way to a remote location to have a bash, run the car for 10 seconds before the pinion grub comes loose, then discover I don't have the right tool to tighten it up.

When I was little, there was a location in the country that always looked brilliant for bashing off-roaders around - lots of little dusty trails up and down steep slopes, but we didn't go there often and I never had a working car when we went.  Then one day the stars aligned, my King Cab was fully operational and the battery was charged, and my dad said we could go.  So I grabbed the Tamiya and my dad put it in the back of the car.

When I got there, it wouldn't work.  My dad had put something on top of the transmitter, which had knocked the power switch to On.  By the time we got there, the Tx batteries were completely flat.

I learnt an important lesson that day: it's much nicer to be angry at yourself for doing something stupid and ruining your own day than to try to hide being angry at someone else who tries to do something nice for you and unintentionally screws it up.

Like @mud4fun I have done the glued tyres thing too.  Actually for years I never glued my tyres.  Firstly because superglue is like throat sweets; when you need it, you desperately need it, and you know you bought some a while ago and you know for sure you didn't use all of it but for some reason it just isn't there any more.  Sometimes I wonder what the fairies are doing with all my throat sweets and superglue.  And secondly because I don't like the idea of doing something permament.  What if I want new tyres?  I don't want to have to buy new wheels too.  And thirdly because, well, I'm really lazy.

So, I arrived at the track with my brand new TA05IFS with my new Tamiya slicks press-fitted over my Tamiya wheels.  Actually I had an excuse for not gluing them - the club ran Sorex tyres, but they were out of stock, so I was only going to run the Tamiya tyres for one round and didn't want to glue a good set of wheels just for one night of racing.  Plus I really wanted to use those actual wheels with the Sorex tyres.  Well, anyway, car on track, start timer counts down, my number is called, I give it full throttle, the car stays still and four tyres go running off down the track on their own.

There were more than a few giggles that day.

Now what other daft things have I done?  Glued my hands to a tyre.  First time I ever used proper tyre glue.  I was at Radshape RC's indoor track, using their pit bench.  I took my first proper scaler there for a play day during a road trip, but (again) I hadn't glued the tyres and they kept coming off on their scale mountain.  I'd never been there before, but I was hoping I'd build a good rapport with some like-minded RC enthusiasts and maybe have a crawl with them at lunch, or something, but they were all really busy doing a stocktake (I don't even think they wanted me to use the track, but I'd driven a few hours to get there and they felt bad about turning me home), so I was pretty much left to my own devices.  I had to interrupt them to buy some glue.  After gluing my left hand to the tyre and my right hand to my craft knife, I thought I would have to interrupt them a second time to say "er, you know that glue you just sold me?  Well, this..."

As it was, I managed to cut my left hand free using the craft knife glued to my right hand, then I was able to take off the craft knife blade with my left hand and cut my right hand free with it.  Losing a lot of fingerprints and a bit of blood seemed better than admitting my utter failure to people I didn't know and who were too busy to be bothering with me.

I'm sure I've done way more stupid things than that, and had some first-day failures too.  Just this week I started assembling my SMT10, to find one of the bearings wouldn't fit over the axle stub.  Instead of investigating and measuring with the callipers I decided to brute force it, and ended up with a completely ruined bearing, a stub axle with grinding marks in it and a swivel hub with a damaged bearing face.  I literally haven't even got off the first page of instructions and I need to buy new parts.  More on that later in a new project thread.

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1 hour ago, Mad Ax said:

I've had a few of these over the years, most already well-documented on here but I'll add them again for posterity: 

 

I have to thank you, got some good laughs reading your post.  Not laughing at you, just seeing how I have done similar things and could see myself doing the exact same things.  On the SMT10, my father just built one and the main counter gear in the transmission literally cracked in half when he tightened the screws, very odd.  He called Axial (Horizon) and they sent him a new gear set within a couple days.  I also had the exact issue you're describing on a set of Axial universal shafts for AR60s a few years back.  Ended up getting the bearing stuckc and ruining the shaft.  I have noticed their quality can be spotty at times...hopefully you get it replaced soon, looking forward to the build thread.

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