[hillmanr2]

I thought I would share the first 2 dumb mistakes of the year for me. I went out to the field last weekend with my 27% extra and my 35% yak. I flew the extra a couple of flights but it wasn't running well. Turns out I forgot to put the exhaust extensions on . Still I got some rust out of the old thumbs.

So time to fire up the the 3w 106. I rebuilt the carb this winter so I wanted to do some extensive ground testing. I fill her up and take her out of the pits to start it up. I turned on the plane and one of the ailerons is up and unresponsive. Thats weird I think, perhaps I plugged the extensions into the power board back wards. No thats not the problem, so I flip the ignition switch and the rudder servos start to go berserk. WTF? I quickly turned the plane off, the the TX. Turn the TX back on and make sure I am on the correct model, yep. Next I check the aileron throws in dual rate, 100% with Lin expo and my flight modes don't work,same with elev. Then it came to me.
Apparently in a drunken haze I completely erased the entire plane from my radio except the name from the radios memory.
It took about 100 flights to get everything set last year
I still wanted to fire up the beast so I strapped the tail and had two buddies hold the wings. Good thing to 'cause I had a 50% chance of having it come on full throttle, and of coarse it did start WOT. At that point I packed up and went home

All is well, luckily I am not as dumb as I look and I copied the model to a friends 9303.

[voyager_663rd]

AND you still have two healthy planes.

Priceless.

[benjhind]

Originally Posted by hillmanr2

Apparently in a drunken haze I completely erased the entire plane from my radio except the name from the radios memory.

Thats great!! I guess I'm not the only one who decides after a few beers, now is the best time to fiddle with my RC gear!

Glad you had a backup. I thought most of you guys who fly the big toys usually have a second copy on the TX, so you can change things around and still keep the original in case you don't like it?

Thanks for the laugh!

Ben

[Guest]

Alright, I'm in, here is my first dumb mistake of the year (well, in regards to model airplanes anyway).

I'm installing the radio in my new Rafale. As I normally do, I put all the servo's in, then begin making the pushrods for them. Ok, typically, I will turn on the radio FIRST to be sure all servo's are centered, and I did that on 6 of the 7 servo's when I installed them. THEN, as an added precaution, before I do the final install, I pull the horns off the servo's after the pushrods are hooked up and turn the radio on to make sure nothing is off center.
Well, this time I forgot. So, I turn on the transmitter, then the receiver, everything is good except my brake servo, it travels to it's center, which unfortunately was not where the horn was. So, it travels the full throw of the air valve...
Now I'm looking at a servo trying to rip an air valve off of it's mount so in my infinite wisdom, instead of shutting off the receiver switch immediately, I grabbed the servo arm and twisted it back to the middle.
Yup, you guessed it, stripped out the gears...

To make matters worse, the servo's in the nose of this jet are not easily removed. Well, the servo itself is, but because of how the leads are run to the receiver, it was a 4 hour job to replace the damaged servo, thankfully it was a cheap servo and not a digital or anything!!!

It was the little fella right up at the front of the servo tray

[hillmanr2]

Originally Posted by benjhind

Thats great!! I guess I'm not the only one who decides after a few beers, now is the best time to fiddle with my RC gear!

Glad you had a backup. I thought most of you guys who fly the big toys usually have a second copy on the TX, so you can change things around and still keep the original in case you don't like it?

Thanks for the laugh!

Ben

The smart guys do