ORIGINAL: acw
In my opinion, the quality of these valves is questionable. I'm probably very unlucky but I bought 2 units and had 2 valves dead on arrival. Todd took care of both but still, this was not the best experience. Further, when they work, there are still a few issues:<div>
</div><div>1) The valve purges the air from the retracts when turned off. With some retracts, it means the retract will occasionally collapse while pushing the plane around with the rx off</div><div>2) I have seen occasional (pretty rare) occurrence of the gear retracting while turning the receiver on. This broke some gear doors on one occasion. And yes, the failsafe was setup properly.</div><div>3) The smooth brake function uses too much air and is not as good as a mechanical smooth stop unit.</div><div>
</div><div>Because of 2 and 3, I use a manual valve on the gear down line.to make sure there is some air when I turn the rx off / on. That's a pain.</div><div>
</div><div>For these reasons, I have decided to go back to a traditional setup.</div><div>
</div><div>Arnaud</div><div>
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Just a few points on these comments:
1) All electronic air valves purge air from the output lines when powered down.... If this is a problem for your setup, consider mechanical. I do have a work-around for this should you have a need to keep air in the system, contact me for info.
2) Both the EV5U and EV5U-PRO have failsafe software to guard against this happening. If your gear are collapsing during power-up, you have either programed the system in reverse (gear down is plumbed to gear up) or you have not performed a rebind of the RX after final programing.
3) Agreed! Nothing performs better than the UP6 Mechanical valve for braking however; these units consume similar volume to the popular jettronic single action valve. A standard size air tank is more than enough volume for a typical flight. We are working on incorporating a low loss brake valve into future multifunction systems.
Todd