RichJohnson

So super long story short, my friend built a tamiya super sherman and it would not die. It was stuck in god mode, take hits but no enigne sputter. I swapped apples with one of mine and same thing. He sent all electronics and radio to tamiya who played with it and said yep, theres a problem but he bought it from an overseas supplier so its not warrantied here in the US. Buyers beware!

any way, he got it back and we began swapping components.
it turns out he did have a bad apple, and one of mine turned out to be bad as well, and that was the one I used to test his tank.
what are the chances of that huh?
well beware, there are some bad apples out there. Two dropped in san diego this year.

Panzerpaul

Love your saga!!! Excellent story telling....

Rustytrax

Odd since the apple only receives the signal and that is interpreted by the MF/DMD units that slows the tank. Also if Tamiya test the MF and determined it to be faulty then how can you be sure that you have 2 apples that are faulty?

RichJohnson

Tamiya said somethig was faulty between attack radio, mf to and battle unit, but did not state which was.

i have 4 apples. 3 plus a customers apple all work properly on his tank. His apple and my bad apple did not work on multipule tamiya tanks.
The symptioms are taking a hit, apple flash but no point scored, no engine sputter, no eventual tank KO.
With these apples you could take hits all day long and never die. Good for cheating.

TheBennyB

Yea, that's pretty weird. Think I have some 15 or so tammy apples and never had one that was bad. My experience with god mode were always one of 3 things. Low battery voltage, apple put in after tank was already powered on, or tank left in test mode. That all said, I definitely know what your talking about with the electronics. I had a local buddy build a tammy Tiger one and only a month after build completion his went to crap. DMD would go solid green then solid orange. He got the same result as your buddy, sent it and they said they'd never seen that failure before. He was lucky enough to have bought it from the AAF so they replaced it but were really trying hard to charge him half price to replace it. One other note, are you guys painting your apples? If you get paint on the fins or lower shiny black plastic ring under the fins it can reduce the sensitivity of the apple. I had an apple that would take hits up to 90'+, then I painted it (fins and reflective ring before I got my learn on.) and it would only work up to 30'. Maybe check the wiring from the base or the pins on the apple. I guess you could get a bum sensor or something, but their just isn't much to fail on an apple. Hope you get it all sorted out without much work either way.

Panther F

Only those who want to will. I like refereed battles but everyone should be honest.

Can't wait until May at Danville!




Jeff

tomhugill

This is interesting as I've had this issue on one of my tanks. What you describe is the same behaviour as when you put a TBU in after you power up the dmd/mfu.

On my tank it turned out there was a bad connection in the plug so it would briefly break contact which turns the tank invunerable. The only way the apple could be bad is if there is an intermittent connection. Move likely there is an issue with the plug of Apple base wiring.

RichJohnson

I suspected the IR base first, and swapped it out, no joy. guys im telling you, maybe its so bizzare you woul have to see it to believe it but i was moving apples and bases around on two tanks and shooting from across the isle with the jumbo and the test results were consistantly the same. The tank with one of the two bad apples took a hit but didnt score it. Over and and over we tried this, resetting tanks every time. My wife was fed up we were at it so long in the garage. I was on the phone with Jeff too wile I was doing it and he ws surprised, he never saw an apple go bad.

I am going to open it up and see if there is a loose wire or bad soler joint in mine, its only been used for about a year and half. My buddy's is a month old and never used. Makes me think it could be my new one and they were in a faulty batch. Time will tell if more bad apples pop up.

Rustytrax

Any way you look at it he Tammy electronics are not holding up well recently. At least for me! I think I have 7 or so MF/DMD units that have failed in one way or another. So @ 135.00 ea that 945.00 is a nice tank!

RichJohnson

Yeah, my new pershing mf has an intermitant fail on the muzzle flash, only every couple times does it flash, started within a couole weeks of getting it. I pulled the flash out becasue it irritated me.

Panther F

That's too bad.

I've been tanking with Tamiya electronics for 12 ~13 years and had no problems at all.




Jeff

RichJohnson

I seem to experience strange failures in every hobby and every facet of my life. Vehicles, ham radios, firearms, trains you name it, i just seem to have a good way of having bizzare problems.

TheBennyB

For sure the tammy electronics are seeming to have more and more failures especially with the flash in the past 2-3 years. Like Jeff, up till that point I never had a single issue with a DMD or MF and I too have been in the tammy IR game for 12-13 years.

tomhugill

Ditto, had 3 kv-1 units go bad. And they're all recently made units

Cruiser133

Sounds like outsourcing has reared its head with Tamiya.

ausf

In fourteen years, I've only had one issue with 6 Tamiyas, and it's an intermittent flash on a Russian MFU.

I don't hold that against them, even though it now sounds like a problem, since that xenon flash is a serious bit of electronics and has a absolutely shelf life to it due to the high voltage.

I have a real respect for the units since I messed around with making some myself. I didn't think you could get that much of a shock from a 7.2 battery supplied system, but holy smokes did that thing light up my arm. I could see it interrupting some heart rhythms. And that was just holding the unshielded cable, not even contacting connections. As far as components go, it's realitively cheap, but sourcing properly shielded cable was too much.

tomhugill

There is an answer and that to use the mako 4 which gives servo recoil and led flash, solves the two bits which I've had fail on the Tamiya electronics all for $20

Shorty54

Why can I not find this Mako4 on their website?

tomhugill

Might be worth contacting not Kevin directly

RichJohnson

So here is something interesting.
I took my bad apple all apart to see if there were any visible flaws like solder joints or breaks etc.
Nada, I used tweesers and looked under the foam the IR is mounted on and peeked around.
I plugged it into a tank and tested it again, it worked. So I moved it to another tank and it worked there too. I moved it back and forth on two tanks and both die with it now.
Go figure....

Now to try this out on my friends apple and see what happens...

heavyaslead

Yep, it was a bad connection (with the apple plug and the mount on the tank).

There are no active electronics in the apple being totally supplied and signal processed by the DMD unit, so electrically speaking, only a bad [pin] connection could cause that.

Sometimes the pin springs get loose from multiple insertions.

Glad you found it.

ausf

My JS-2 TBU base has a hinky female receptacle in it that can be hit or miss. I need to pull it to fix, just haven't got around to it since it's a chore to access (and I even drilled a hole under the overhang to reach the screw before I glued the turret together). Every so often it'll act up, always remedied by leaning the apple back and restarting.

RichJohnson

So i took my buddies apple appart tonight and jnspcted it with a flash light and magnafier, i dont see any phyiscal flaws in it. But there are electronic componenets that the IR sensor sends through before the signals go to the pins for the base. I assume one of them has failed. Might be as simple as as a static discharge could have nuked them.

My bad apple sometimes works, sometimes doesnt. It is not consistant tank to tank. It is not the bases, its defineately the apple being wacky. It works most of the time but once in a while it doesnt kill the tank.

RichJohnson

Ok guys, I have done lots more trouble shooting and I have updates and sad news. Some of you will say Im crazy but I troubleshoot mechanical equipment for a living and I know what I am doing for a trouble shooting process... Most of the time LOL.

Ok so here is an update. My friend with the super Sherman that we determined to have a bad apple, bought a new apple. It arrived yesterday and we tested it out this evening. Guess what, it will not kill his super Sherman. The tank registers the IR hit but the engine does not sputter.
I quickly went through my 4 apples. I have numbered them after the last big round of tests. #1 was my "Bad" apple that I took apart and for what ever reason it began working after that. #1 did not kill his tank. I went through #2 through #4 and these three all killed his tank just fine.
I did swap bases out to the new base as well, exact same results.

Now, I was shooting at him with my Jumbo, an IBU2 system. I moved the apples over to my tank and began to test.
All 4 of my apples worked on the IBU system. Including my #1.

Ok so we are scratching our heads. So then I take his new "Bad" apple and put it on my Jumbo, guess what, it kills my jumbo. Ok, so that's weird.
We pull out his old "Bad" Apple, and put it on the jumbo, IT kills my jumbo.

OK so now we are ready to bang our heads on the wall but I continue.
To recap, his old, and new and my #1 "Bad" apples do not kill his Tamiya Israeli super Sherman, but they all kill my Jumbo with an IBU2 system.

So we run these three apples back through his super Sherman with the old and new bases with the same results of none of them killing his tank.

Now is where it gets interesting....
I put my Jumbo away, and get out my EZ8 that is running Tamiya Pershing Electronics.
I run all the apples through my pershing electronics. I get the exact same results with my Tamiya Pershing electronics as his Tamiya super Sherman.
Both of his apples, and my #1 do not kill the tank, but #2,3 and 4 do.

I then fire up my last stock Tamiya Sherman, exact same results as my EZ8 pershing system and his super Sherman system.

So now we have figured out that these 3 bad apples will not kill a Tamiya tank. But wait there's more!

I bust out my M4a1 which is running a BARC4 system. I run all these apples through this tank. Every apple kills the tank just fine. Not one hiccup.

So this explains why I thought my "Bad" apple #1 began working after I took it apart because I slapped it into my jumbo with an IBU2 because that was the tank I had a battery in on my bench and was playing with at the time. But when I first tested it it was on his Super Sherman and my EZ8, both Tamiya systems.

The lessons learned from all of this testing...

#1 There are brand new bad apples out there that suppliers have that will not kill Tamiya tanks. Beware. IF you have a problem, mark your apple and start swapping.

#2 Tamiya is probably not aware of this yet as they played with my buddies tank for two weeks and shrugged their shoulders and sent it back to him and would not warranty it because he bought it from Banzai hobby in Japan. If you want tech support, do not buy a tank or battle system from an outside of US distributor.

#3, The most bizzare thing that the "Bad" apples that will not kill Tamiya tanks seem to work just fine on after market electronics systems. At least the IBU2 and the Battle Armor BARC systems.
These systems must not be as sensitive to the signaling system that the apples send to the MFU.

At this point, no one can contest that my methods are not scientific, through and accurate.

FACT, Tamiya is putting out bad apples. Hopefully it has passed by already but who knows how long it may continue and if they will acknowledge it.

ausf

Did you look at the pins?

I'm not being a wise guy or flippant when asking, I have the exact issue you describe but it is a pin issue. Every apple I have, both TBUs and my own mirror based design and 4 sensor designs work in every tank but the JS-2. My designs work in the JS-2, but the TBUs sometimes do, sometimes don't. And if they don't, leaning it back makes it work, which leads me to believe it's a pin contact issue since the apple is just a relay for the sensor, very little that can go south in it, but they all have to make contact.