Longsheep

I ordered mine directly from Clark so this may not help, but Clark fixed and shipped it back all for free.
It was a TK22 Leo2A6 that somehow shorted. It has been working fine for over 2 year now.

sollie

I blew my amp on the tk20 and sent direct to Clark for rep and uppgrade to TK24 .

Imex-Erik

I would check out Clark's website and send him a message there first. I have both IBU2 and Clark TK22 boards and both have been of good quality and still running strong after a few years of abuse (trust me, I know how to abuse a tank!). This being said, I am SUPER careful with all my electronics and probably spend more time wiring than building. Luckily both vendors are quick to respond and know their products well. I would give him an email first and let him know what happened, sometimes fixes are a lot easier than you think. Both Ian and Clark I rate pretty high for customer service and that's a lot coming from me

Jay-Em

Well guys. Thanx for all the tips and feedback, but it seems I have fixed it!(yay me!)

I guess I got lucky. Annoyed like heck I sat down for an hour and gave the board a thourough once-over. With the help of a magnifying glass and a powerful LED light I found the culprit of my woes.

The battery contra-mini molex on the board had one pin loose in its soldering. I probably wiggled a bit too much with the power-lead. It was a really tiiiiiny hairline around the + pin. Go figure. A small tap with my pencil soldering-iron on 350 degrees, fixed it. (happy that I once bought a quite expensive soldering station)

Now onto the next problem: My Carson reflex 6-channel is all kinds of bungled up by its manufacturer. Not even one channel is in its right place. All are at least rotated 90-degrees, and one is 3, 3 is 2 etc. etc. What a mess. And here I was, wondering why -at first- my Kyosho Blizzard acted all kinds of funny with the Sabertooth and the Reflex. had to switch around servo and esc-connections in all sorts of mad ways to get it to work.

With some random stick-wiggling I got the Clark started (felt like playing the first Mortal Kombat: mad bashing of buttons and wiggling sticks in the hope to get somewhere. ) got the engine to run.. oeh.. nice'n throaty, and drive for a bit. Imagine having throttle on the right horizontal, steering on the left vertical etc. Maddening!!!! Especially when all the extra toys require all sorts of magical gesturing with the sticks. Gun made an impressive loud bang, MG rattled satisfactory -the times I randomly seemed to hit the right stick-wiggle-magic-

Kinda exiting in a bad way. I could fire the machine-gun, or try to, but that could just as well result in shooting myself in the eyes with a bb.. Or the turret would rotate. Or the engine could switch off. You'd never know..

I think I am going to gut the Carson Reflex and re-wire the pots so that they start to make sense.

TheBennyB

Do you have to gut and rewire or just change channel assignments to sticks? Is the TX programmable? Could also be the mode the TX is on, Mode 1 or Mode 2?

Jay-Em

Sadly not programmable .it's a rather bare-bone 6-channel. No mode-switches, no programming, no mixing etc. The only "luxuries" are reverse-switches. So I 'll have to go the "analog" route, ie fiddle about with the stick's pots.

Its simplicity is a boon here. Switching around stuff is not very Hard. Every stick fits in several ways, and pots are just stuck in de dunbells/rotating axle thingies. (?) The only problem is that the manufacturer has been seriously frugal with the wire-lengths, hence the need to re-solder stuff when rotating the stick-modules.

It's no biggie, just a bit of an annoyance.

My new IBU2-pro comes with a compatible, programmable 6-channel transmitter as a package. I guess hat will be much less of a head-ache.

TheBennyB

I don't know, I use simple futaba 4ch flysky's for all my tanks. Love the simplicity. if you search you'll find all kinds of threads on people getting ready to put a slug through their head
programming their radio's to work. Not a big deal if you've been there before though.

wright 971

Hi Guys I drive my tanks like I stole them, I don't give them the gentle touch at all, run them in all conditions thick mud ,sand ,snow even run them on flat wooden floors (not as much fun). Only smoked a few boards all RX18 , Have blown a fuse on a IBU, Ian was at meeting and had a spare so that was fixed quick. I have Tamiya setups and also Elmod, IBU, and clark ,never had a problem with clark boards apart from the first boards which had a IR>range problem . My larger tanks King Tiger run with 480 motors and steel gears ,Have a bergepanther 480 motors steel gears and a clark board, runs fine. One thing when I setup my tanks default setting on radio is left stick main gun fire , if signal is lost so the tank stops and main gun fires if signal lost for any reason ,better this than a runaway tank which I have seen at a meeting Jagdtiger ran off at full speed straight into a wooden building and smashed the barrel back .This is when I started to make sure it didn't happen to any of mine.



regards pete

DU Penetrator

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZFjigG0qJ0 <-----this

6 Clarks since 2013, 4 were paired to TBS mini = all good 'till now.

Panther G

Well, if Dan is going to continue with making his BARC system boards I will probably stay with them. If not I'm going back to my near bullet proof Tamiya electronics and just add the Benedinni to them.

Jay-Em

yyeahh..

About that "putting a slug through one's head. I wholly share the sentiment. At the moment I try getting an IBU 2 to act nice with a Turnigy i6.

The only thing I managed, is making the IBU go completely bonkers after attempting to calibrate the hellish contraption (dipswitch 8 on " On", etc. IBU owners know what I mean) All samples start running together, motors went wild. Allthewhile that stock German Kriegslied kept looping, and all of that without even starting the tank. Luckily I could catch the tank before it catapulted itself into some solid objects next to my workbench.... Complete mayhem, like some noisy bolgia in Dante's inferno..

I basically admitted defeat, stored the IBU 2, and stuck the original Heng Long 2.4 back. At least that worked, crappy sounds be damned.

The Clark, on the other hand, runs fine. And the sound is even better now I added a Visaton FRS-7 in a home-made housing (a hard plastic box that a high torque Absima servo came in. Fits like a glove) I bought a couple of those Visatons at a sale, Just €9.- a piece. Boxes were a bit tatty, that was all. Not a bad deal for a good quality wide range speaker.

Only problem is that it switches off when under a bit of a load in my 4kg Challenger 2. I guess the Graupner Speed 400's gobble a bit too many Amps for the Clark. It runs fine on flat ground, or slight inclines, but hooboy when attempting to climb a small hill, or a grassy knoll. IBU 2 with Igarashi 5-poles just chugs on, Clark goes into brown-out and restart. Yay for the integrated over-current shut-down.

Oh, well.

I guess it's time to go back to plastic tracks. Luckily the current gen plastic tracks aren't too bad, not like those brittle nasties that came on Heng long's earlier models..

All in all, the Clark is a bit too low-spec for my tanks. It's not bad parse, but not very impressive tbh. An improvement on the original HL stuff, but no more than that.

It'll be IBU2 and 3 for the forseeable future for me. I finally got the IBU 2 pro working, and was bloody impressed.

Jay-Em

Found out something pretty important:

Clark boards are -in principal- not really compatibel with older, analog-type transmitters & receivers.
Apparently the drift on those is as such that the Clark gets all kinds of confused. Same goes for the IBU 2 PRO.

I got a flysky t6 and a Turnigy i6 now, and they both work fine with the Clark as well as the IBU.

the Carson is back to simple servo-duty on the Kyo Blizzard. Thàt, at least, works fine.

Imex-Erik

Programming is always fun lol. I assign all my 16ch and just copy a model and modify from there. The Taranis is crazy difficult to program but totally worth it in the end. The learning curve is steep but there is almost no limit to the transmitter. In fact I use mine to play music while I play. I just ordered a Visaton BF32 to install in my transmitter to improve the quality actually. I had to have a custom 3d printed mount made. The TBS Tango is looking to be a good simple alternative with built in FPV screen though, I may get one in the coming months and see how it goes. My next mod is to remove all the accents and replace them with real carbon fiber panels....

Cruiser133

Thanks for the heads up. I have a Clark in my Lowe that has full metal suspension, tracks, road wheels, the works, so it weighs a ton. I have not even hooked it up yet, so reading your thoughts, I may move the Clark to my T55 which is much lighter and go Tamiya in the Lowe...

Jay-Em

@cruiser

it s quite possible that Your Tank runs fine, even with all the metal. It's wholly dependent on the motors used. The Graupner 400's I used are wound a bit more aggressive than the mostly used Jamara 400's. I am not absolutely sure, but I believe that the Graupners use a somewhat thicker wire for the winds, ànd use a lower wind.

that makes for alot of power, but also for large spikes in amp-use when the load increases, especially on low-revs. Those spikes may either overwhelm the NimH pack, òr the Clark sees them as a short, or something, and shuts off. I dunno.

In due time, I will experiment for a bit with LiPo's and Graupner speed 400's. For now I use 390-sized (aka 480) flight motors with a somewhat milder character, part of that character coming from the use of weak-iron mantles/flux-rings. The motors àre bigger, but because they do not have to work so hard, they don't gobble the amps that short-can Graupner 400's do. The longer cans also mean longer magnets and longer poles = much more torque, but somewhat lower revs.