Gryphon

Hi all,
After driving around aimlessly for over an hour, we decided we were too bashful to just go anywhere. So we went to an AMA sanctioned club. Surprisingly there was no one around. We unlocked the gate and went in. Used my frequency checker and its antenna for extended range found no one on any channel. Great.
Since I hurt my brother’s hand over a year ago when he was launching my Zagi with me at the throttle, he refused to throw the Stryker for me.
Keep in mind this was about a 49 O.Z. beast instead of 21 o.z. stock weight.
I said fine you take the controls and I will do the launch.
Due to great advice from Buggygovroom, I gave it a good throw, 45degrees up from horizon with the motor on and set at somewhere between 75-100% throttle.
The plane did not dip one inch, it went right up like it meant business.
The trim was very close, so he just gave it a very minor and quick trim.
Excitement was too much, not sure of any speeds or how much time had passed by. It all seems like a blur now.
As I remember now, I saw him come out of a dive and I thought that is just too fast, I am watching him do funny things and I said to him WHAT ARE YOU DOING? He didn’t answer me, I watched him some more and again I said WHAT ARE YOU DOING? He was totally ignoring me, now I’m getting mad a little. Plane is all over the place and now going far.
He finally answered and said he is fighting the plane and it is not under control and if I wanted to take over, I got scared, intimidated, confused and didn’t know what to say.
After another 10-15 seconds I composed myself, took the transmitter and started to fight it, the plane was kind of getting far away and it had been doing many vertical loops on its own, too many to count so far. I think my brother may have flown it for 1 ½ minutes or so.
I am fighting it and somehow it is not going down and crashing, serious time had gone by. It was now further away.
Forgot to mention that the throttle control was very bad all the while. Not responsive, very little control and it was going all kinds of things RPM wise, cutting out and this and that.
I look over at my dad who was filming. He had his back to the plane and facing some where in my direction, not even at me….(getting too old I guess), I pointed to the plane real quick. He didn’t see me, oh well.
I was able to gain control to bring it back towards us and I had set the throttle to half way. With head wind it took it a while to come back from very far away thank god for the JR’s 1 mile range. But I was actively fighting it all along. The semi level flight back only lasted about 30 seconds at most. The damn loops started again.
I didn’t understand how come there was no crash yet. It had been nearly 3 minutes of no control to little control over the moving surfaces and the motor. What the hell was going on?
Plane started to have no control again; I cut the motor and watched the plane come out of a loop in near perfect tangent line to the ground.
The plane was far away, we took a mental picture of the trees in relation ship to the landing site, locked up the gates and too our tools in a speedy fashion.
We went down several streets, and asked people about the plane. They heard it but didn’t see it. After the last guy said no, and we started to drive off, his 3 year old girl said I know where the plane is daddy.
We followed her down the street and into a field. We heard and saw the fire trucks go past us. I asked my brother to go find them and I followed the guy and his daughter.
The fireman and I walked up to the plane at the same time as the neighbor was pointing over his fence at the spot.
It was the weirdest thing, I was looking at an image of the plane, looked just like my plane, but I was looking at the ground. It was like a near invisible black haze and you could see the ground below it.
They did not let me pickup the parts, they sprayed water on it for a few minutes. Mean while I asked about my fines and fees and I let them know what the plane cost, and that I had brought my own fire extinguisher and that I was at a Sanctioned field. The fireman said don’t worry about it, it is all good.
There was nothing left but the batteries, motor, and pieces of the ESC, all foam was gone, I mean gone, receiver gone, servo’s gone, there was a lot of burned 3M extreme tape.

**Another fireman said: here you go, I found another piece. It was the nose piece with no scratches on it just couple of feet away. Look at the pic, no scratch, just some mud from the area being sprayed by water. The fire had put itself out before anyone got there.

I bagged the pieces and later sent them back to various companies to see what they could make out of it.

No one had any answers, but they all stepped up and tried to help out best they could.

The motor will need minimal repair and it is sent out of the country for repair. It will be 6 weeks before I can tell the cost, so I need to wait another 4-5 weeks.
Most of the main manufacturers took good care of me and I am more than satisfied with their efforts.
The big surprise was Horizon Hobby who sells the JR receiver, I did not even have a piece of metal or melted plastic to send to them, they credited me a receiver at no cost, unlike some of the other companies who charged me half or ¼ for their pieces. Others did not charge me anything.
Again I am happy with each and every company involved; I just wish I could find the cause of the following:
1) What was going on in the air?
Speculations by various companies all pointing the finger at every where else
Such as some one turning on their radio on your frequency in one of the houses, bad receiver, bad ESC, bad transmitter,
2) How did the fire start?
Speculation by various companies: bad battery, bad ESC, short in motor causing the fire(hardest to believe)
Note: there was no dent in the batteries and the nose cone had not even a scratch on it, so the landing was soft. UNBELIEVABLY LUCKY LANDING.

For 1 week I was so in shock, I was numb, 2nd week I sent the parts out and started ordering some of the parts for my next Stryker project. By 3rd week I had the decisions from all companies and I knew what I had to deal with.

I will build the same plane again, with even more reinforcement, meanwhile I think I can hit the same projected speeds with a MEGA 16/25/2 but it will have to work much harder than the above larger motor to get there. 75+ Amps!!! Let’s see, I will let you know. I have every tool and my friend has the infrared temp gun.

There is a new Spektrum that will be released next week for airplanes which is going to have a longer range than the current unit, I will buy that just to make sure that I will operate at a higher frequency than the noises that can be generated on board by the motor and ESC, etc… unfortunately, I think it is going to be 7 ch, so it will be more expensive than I thought. We will find out next week. They are giving out no information until next week. Hope it comes with bigger servos than the last Spektrum did.

Stay tuned to the same BAT channel. Because my next Stryker will go like a BAT out of HELL. I will shoot for 115 MPH radared during the first week on 4S, before I prop up more.

***Next maiden flight in about 2 weeks or so.

Take care my friends, I wish I had better news for you. I was too bummed to write before this. I hope you understand. Time to move on now. But I think it will be at 115-125 MPH very soon. Blame the dark side that is calling me and following me.

Gryphon

Gryphon

Here are some pics after the landing/fire.

bleary

Man what a bummer.Sounds like you have lifted yourself up of the canvas though Gryphon,cheers to ya.
Did it appear to be smoking before it went down at all?To my way of thinking the culprit sounds like heat causing a short.I had a plane that partially melted the motor wires to cause an intermittent short,first I saw of it was a thin plume of blue smoke,then the plane was all over the place with throttle and controls like you mention.
Best of luck with the next one buddy.
Cheers,
Bleary.

Wastegate

Sad news Gryphon! Hard for anyone to make a diagnosis with so little left but good luck with the next.

Gryphon

bleary, Wastegate, thank you both.

I also want to thank many of you who have shown your support in your PMs and e-mails to me, too many to list here.

Good luck to all.

Special thanks to Glacier Girl, who helped me in the early days when I needed it the most. GG you inspired me to help and teach others because you did the same for me, patiently.

Gryphon

drunkenbushman

Thats a shame man.

Good luck with the next one, i know there will be a next one

critterhunter

Gryphon, was just skimming over this thread (first I've saw of it...somehow missed it before) and thought...."This one deserves a print out so I can read over it in comfort with a coffee and smoke." Really don't know how it ends yet but I'm sure the story is going to be good judging by the pictures! Or, "sad"...."Sad", I meant to say...[&o] Off to read it now...

Glacier Girl

My Feedback: (4)

Gryphon,
Bummer man. But looking at photo #1 may give some answers.
Top pack's wires are toast yet the ones leading to the esc and other pack don't look to bad. Also it looks like the wires from the motor to the esc appear to be there. If I had to guess, from that photo, I'd say the top pack caused the fire, whether it was a short or the pack just couldn't handle the load, is hard to say. I'd also guess the other damage was from the continued running of the motor, top pack exploded cell, as can be seen in the photo, from what I can see the other packs cells (bottom one)don't appear to be balloned, just looks like more then likely fire damage. I'd say the continued flying blew the fire back over the rest of the electronics, and motor, cooking them.
I'm surprised but then again maybe not surprised that you didn't see a trail of smoke, I know how in the excitement of the moment you can tend to zoom in on the bird and all else becomes lost. [&:]

fiver

Ouch...that is sad. Good luck on the next one!

critterhunter

Just finished reading over the thread and want to apologize if my first response (having not yet read the ending) seemed a bit light hearted. A few months back I lost control of a Stryker maiden with the new 12T motor (think I blew a control rod) and, although I was keeping it in the middle of a field and above me), I killed the motor and watched the high plane "glide" over to a busy road where it came down. My heart was in my throat, not for fear of what would happen to the plane, but because I was terrified it would hit a windshield or cause a wreck when it landed. Luckily it hit the road when no cars were present but by the time I finished the long walk over to it it had been run over several times. Everything was a complete loss...ESC, servos, motor, RX...All squished to darn near flat. I was happy, though. Why? Because I realized then how lucky I was not to have hit a car or caused a wreck. It scared the living h*ll out of me and I will no longer fly a plane, regardless of how comfortable I feel with it, near any kind of property, people, or roads. If you think about it the flip of a coin could have had me in jail, being sued, or having to live with somebody's death. I'm sure these kinds of thoughts must have been going through your head. Seeing a fire truck and all would have had me on the verge of a nervous break down. Again, I apologize for my light hearted first response I made before reading the message. People, please....This is a good time to point out that safety is everything. Wanting to fly our "toys" is no excuse for overlooking safety. It's small in the scheme of things when we consider the possible loss of life.

Glacier Girl

My Feedback: (4)

Lord Hunter,
As I've always preached to you guys, safety first. Nice to see you carrying it on.
Mr. Murphy will spring up on you even when you are doing everything right. In Gryphon's case he was flying at a sanctioned field. Followed the rules, and still once it goes bad, you have no control, and yep he was very lucky with what only got damaged.
We all have to remember these "TOYS" can and will do damage if they hit something, and most of us carry the physical scars from learning this. These scars would be nothing as you said, to the emotional ones, if someone else was hurt by our actions.

Very good points to bring up. We all sometimes need reminded.

I knew there was a good reason to make you an "Elder". You're doing a great job.

Gryphon

Thank you for your caring resposes.

GG in the picture with the burned parts layes out:
The lower battery that is balloned, was the forward battery in the plane.
The picture's top battery that looks to be the burned was in the middle of the plane and 1/2 of the CC80 ESC was laying on it. The other half of the ESC was in the dead space between the 2 batteries.
Castle creation said that they think a short in the motor(my new motor which pulled same numbers as MOTOCalc's predictions) caused too many amps in the ESC/battery and then.....Fire. I'm not so sure of that one.

Also I did use a seperate flight pack(pics in the middle of thread), so the BEC could not have overheated.

Take care,
Gryphon

bleary

Hey no offence CritterHunter,but Gryphon just lost his Mega Zilla Stryker....he did everything right,poo happens sometimes.
Life is so regulated at the moment,I dont wanta hear about what ifs...maybes or perhaps...he had a red hot go,and good on him.
The mega big fast plane crashed and burned.such is life.
poo happens,
Goodonya Gryphon!
Bleary.

gigelus2k3

Hello,

Just a quick question: is it really safe to put two powerful packs in parallel?

Beside their internal resistance and of the wires up to the joining point (both are small), there's nothing that helps balancing their current. This would mean that it's very likely one battery whill have to support most of the current while the other is simply unloaded and riding for free...

When building packs that have multiple cells in parallel (e.g. 4s2p), you connect in series the paralleled unit cells. Each set of cells put in parallel is carefully matched for capacity and internal resistance.

What I suggest to do would be to buy elementary cells (e.g. the 2200mAh ones) and charge all of them to 4.2V. If you have access to an electronic load, you could estimate the internal resistance by noting (Kelvin-wise) how much the cell voltage drops when you apply a sudden 5A (or 10 or whatever). Then you would pick pairs of cells with similar resistances and build your pack. Finally, before attempting using the pack for high-discharge rates, you should run a few complete discharging cycles at mild current followed by low current charging, so that the pairs of cells "get used" to each other.

Serban

Gryphon

These packs were bought directly from Thunder Power. I made a request to get them from the same batch.
They said it would be fine for what I was doing with them.

I cycled them together (break in), charged and discharged them to together.

I have a 10 cell Thunder Power balancer that I used with them.

The charger used was Thunder Power 10 cell charger and they supplied a series cable for me to charge them in series to make sure that they got the same amount of MAh in them.

While being charged as 10 cells, they were also connected to the 10 cell balancer per their included directions.

The balancer and charger were connected through a data port, which the charger used to monitor all 10 cell voltages.

I had to label one battery "A", the other "B", they 'B" battery had to be connected to a particular end of the series cable; I think it was the negative side as I remember.
Then "A" needed to be plugged into balancer, then lastly "B" needed to be plugged in.
Straying away from that would cause the balancer to be damaged.

All directions were followed, and there was no sign of any problems with my parallel onboard "Y" cable which survived the fire. That is the only single thing that is still usable and in my tool box, besides a muddy nose cone.

This is not car/truck racing that people need matched cells and we need to worry about the very last second of run time. Given the high amps, when the ESC cut-off happens, there is still plenty of battery capacity left. Given lower current draw there would still be some run time left. But I never do a restart when cut-off happens, I just glide in.

These were new batteries which after being cycled not just once, but twice, then had only one series of test runs on them to determine prop/amp/RPM combinations, then charged for maiden flight.

I propped down for maiden flight with a 6.5X5.5 and fresh off the charger reading was 69.5Amps and dropped from there. I then left the house for maiden flight.
I never flew full throttle, so I stayed well below 31.5Amps per pack.
Thunder power received a letter from me with all the above facts, and they saw nothing wrong.
I would hope that they know what they were doing.

I have several friends on this site, including my own best friend who run parallel packs, I guarantee just about non of them balance both packs simultaneously using 1 balancer. My friend draws 80+ amps out of his TP 2100-3S prolite parallel packs (31.5amp const rating each), that was a whole lot more than me. His packs are also from 2 different planes and have different number of run on them. Also one of his packs is dented. No problems there.(not that I recommend doing what he does).

I did not have any issues with my setup as far as my battery configuration. Although my next pack is going to be TP 3850 Extreme series with 84A const, 152A burst rating. I have that in 5S and also 6S.

Who knows there may have been a defect in one of the batteries.
If you see my pics above, the inside of the plane was seriously gutted out with plenty of cooling for all parts, because I intended to prop up to 90+ Amps for future flights. So the cooling was not an issue.

I believe for some reason the CC80 set the lipoly battery on fire, but am not sure of it. So this is going to remain a mystery. In the future there will be no contact between the battery and ESC. My original plan was to carve out the wing to fit the ESC, I also thought of placing it in one of the opened up vent holes. Next time, it might go in a vent holes if I ever do a dual battery setup again and run out of room.

I do agree with critterhunter as far as staying safe, but then again as bleary stated "S... H... I ... T... happens" no matter how careful we are.
All my brother kept saying was thank god that I made him go back to his house, after we were down the street, to get the fire extinguisher. He will never leave his house without it. Oh yeah, since last year we carry first aid in our tool boxes.

But I do thank all of you for your comments and for trying to help out and see what went wrong.

Gryphon

SS2P

Personally I think that if you really wanna go so fast by a pylon racer and go with 135 or since gryphoon you live in San f. than you could try DS flying... Cheap and I've radared mine at 220 mph That was a lot of money there...

Good luck!

flyingace451

Ouch that reall REALLY sucks, man. By the looks of it, the fire happened from something in the middle/rear of the fuse, because the front lipo is only scratched up (I think you said it was the front) and the nose cone is ready to go in plane number 2. My best guess is an Rx problem, because of the lack of control/response before the crash.

That really sucks!!! It makes it better when the manufacturers treat with decently, and I'm happy to hear that. But that still won't make up for a trashed plane, once again, that sucks.

I always attempt to look on the brightside of stuff, so now you have one heck of a story to tell. Did you happen to get it on video?

Gryphon

I have not seen the video yet.

But my brother says it just shows the launch. It shows me launching it, he was on the controls while my dad was filming.

My father is not that far below 70 years old and he started to wonder off after some time.

I wish I had seen the video and could give you a better answer.

Guys what do I do with the video? Should I post it some where or just e-mail to who ever wants to see it.

I guess it would be a short clip of the launch at the worst.

I have never posted a video anywhere, but I have seen friends videos on you-tube (spelling?).

Not a clue what to do there.

***Note: Currently I only care about Strykers and I do not want to fly anything faster than a Stryker body can go at this time. But I will keep those other fast birds in mind for the future. But before then don't be surprised if I strap a large glow motor to the Stryker first, LOL.....

Gryphon

SS2P

But think about it because I feel sad about that money! Ouch! And I can't even afford my self a 200 dollar 3d plane

SS2P

I would guess that the motor/esc burned cause it would ALOT OF HEAT to burn down the motor.. I mean lipos could have burned anyway (in a crash brake/bend etc..) but the motor had to start burning.. You should have a had a camera on there!! That would have been funny!

critterhunter

Not trying to say he did anything wrong. I didn't think I was doing anything wrong when I lost control of my previous Stryker a few months back. I'm only trying to point out that we all (including myself) need to keep safety in mind at all times and as much as possible. Plan for the worst and hope for the best.

critterhunter

Just trying to pay back some for all the great help the true Elders like you and Cadetman gave to me and others. My knowledge still doesn't compare but I try to help out wherever I can.

bleary

Sorry Critter not having a go at you,just sometimes things happen despite our best efforts to the contary.I agree that safety is important,but sometimes when you launch them they can have a mind of their own...
I feel bad for Gryphon after all the time money and effort he put in,worse still it is probably a bit hard to tell what went wrong now.My previous post probably came across a bit harsh.I apoligise.
Cheers,
Bleary.

drunkenbushman

Post the vid over at youtube or putfile. com and then just link it from there so all who want to see can, less time consumaing that just emailing it to everyone who wants to see i think.

Glacier Girl

My Feedback: (4)

Well I don't like to let something go without figuring out what went wrong.
Gryphon and I have been PM ing back and forth and I've been studying the photos.
And the answer was in the very first post here. How I missed it I have no idea.
The packs were not rated high enough in capacity and C rating for what was being pulled out of them. Second pack in line detonated a weak cell and blew up, first pack was probably following right along but didn't get the chance to finish as the rest of the system fried, before that pack could self impload. Both packs were more then likely already hurting somewhat from the use of the bigger prop and a couple of static testing runs. Even with the smaller prop on, draw was more then the packs could sustain. []