Charles,
The idea of the second Yak kit was to just have a complete set of spare parts but you make a good point that it would be better to become accustomed to a gas engine on a smaller and less expensive plane. I will take that into consideration.
If your friend was charging his Lipos through the charge port, then he was not balance charging, since that is charging right into the power leads. When you do that the charger is basically blind to what is going on with the battery since it cannot see the individual cells. Some of the older TP Pro Lites did not evn have a balance tap on them and I would not consider using these in my plane. But with the balance tap and a good charger, I would be comfortable charging my reciever Lipos while in the plane if they were hard to remove. Lipo technology has come a long way..laptops used to blow up pretty often in the not to distant past! The A123's of course are much safer though about 40% heavier I estimate.
Good idea keeping a frie extinguisher around close.
James
ORIGINAL: cjcyclesrc
James,
This is just a little food for thought. If you ultimately want to end up with a 110'' Yak w/DA-100 on pipes, You might want to consider building one of your 88's with a gas motor. That way you would get some hands on experience with a gas motor and be getting comfortable setting up and tuning your motors.
I had never seen a lipo burn until a little over a month ago. I was in Tyler flying with some friends. We were standing around talking and heard an explosion. We looked around and flames were coming out of his 50cc plane. It was sitting in the pitts on charge. Luckly there was a fire extinguisher handy and my friend was able to get the fire put out. It burned the inside of the plane pretty bad, but they got the fire put out before the fuel tank melted. He was using TP 1320 pro lites, but charging them through the switches. Needless to say he put A123's back in his new plane. The AMA Fire insurance did pay. I guess our AMA memberships are useful. I did get some pictures but I'm at my parents in Georgia and don't have them here.
Happy New Year Everyone!!!!!!!