RobinB66

My Feedback: (1)

Hey guys! New to the forum,postee like 1 time already, Was wondering if it would be possible To take the 4.99 cent cox microservos from the sight and replace the servo leads with those from my futaba or high tech. Building a lazy bee and using .049 power to fly it, Building it light and trying to save weight. Already got one of the 6.99 cent .049 ordered for it!Any opinions would be greatley appreciated
Robin!![&:]

BMatthews

Welcome aboard Robin!

Putting on the new leads is certianly very possible but with the size of the circuit boards on the mini and micro servos it requires a very fine tip on your soldering iron and a fair degree of skill and finess.

But many of the plugs these days are interchangeable. You may not need to change it other than shaving off a bit of plastic. It all depends on the lead layout. And if the Cox connector lead pattern is different it's possible that you can unlock the pins, extract them from the connector body and then cross over the leads and put them back in. No soldering required and no new leads to be purchased.

All this would need to be checked as I don't have the pin layout for COX stuff in front of me and I'm not sure what the connectors look like. But the bottom line is that it's very doable.

But if you need to buy servo leads as well as the servos then it's quite possible that you're better off buying servos from another source with the proper leads on them already. There's enough specials around these days that the ready to go servo may match the price of the Cox + new lead price or be within a couple of dollars and save you the trouble and risk of damage to the circuit board. Check with some of the site's supporters like Tower and FMA Direct to see what they have.

muddy69

My Feedback: (2)

The connectors on the cox servos are like the old airtronics servos (the cox servos were made by sanwa). The pin outs are setup to run on a airtronics/sanwa receiver, but can be switched around to work with other receiver types. The servo's themselves are not really considered micro by todays standards. Considering that they weight more than the newer micro servos, and you are going to run a .049 on the Lazy Bee ,I would go for some lighter servos.

Andrew

Bruce --

I may be misguided (common occurrance), but I think Robin may be considering just clipping the old connector off and splicing a new lead in without opening the servo. Generally, the leads will have black as ground, red as positive and the signal wires are usually white, yellow or orange.

BuzzBomber

My Feedback: (4)

The pins on the end of the servo lead can easily be removed and swapped into a new connector housing by prying up the tab with an exacto blade and pulling gently. The hard part might be finding a new connector housing, unless you happen to have some dead servos or extra extensions lying around. The upside to this approach is that you don't have to do any soldering, just find the correct housing, and check polarity when re-installing. I bought some GWS servos a few years back that came with extra connector housings and a set of instructions on how to change them depending on your receiver type, so that's where I learned this little nugget.

Tom @ Buzzard Bluff

Exactly. I did the reverse only last week, installing a Cox Rx & a pair of Futaba servos in an old sailplane I'm putting back in service. In order to match the Futaba servos to the Cox Rx I had only to exchange the positions of the black (neg) & red (pos) wires for it to all operate properly. So your case should be indentical if you're using the Cox servos with Hi-Tec or Futaba gear. Just switch positions of the red & black.

<The hard part might be finding a new connector housing>

That shouldn't be neccessary. I was able to plug the rewired Futaba connectors into the Cox Rx with no troubles, so theoretically (Boy has that gotten me into a lot of trouble in the past![]) the reverse should also apply. HTH, Tom

mclintock

My Feedback: (3)

I have some of those servos, from way back when. They work ok enough, the connector is the old style airtronics with the pinout different to all others in the world. Sanding down the bumps and re-arranging the wires may work, I'll have to try it myself!

Meanwhile, you may consider these for just a little more, weigh less for one thing..
http://hobbypeople.net/gallery/444045.asp

N1EDM

My Feedback: (2)

Where can I find out about these Cox microservos? Is there a website?

Thanks,

Bob

RobinB66

My Feedback: (1)

http://www.coxmodels.com/

Later RobinB!![8D]

Andrew

I buy all of our [link=http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/catalogs/c252/P112.pdf]housings and pins [/link] thru Jameco -- the non-polerized housings have 0.1" centers and fit anything I have. It does require a crimp tool to set the pins, but the crimp has both a roll crimp over the wire and strain-relief fingers rolled over the insulation.