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i took my super stick back to the field last night after switching the prop and adding a little weight to the tail (see other super stick post) fueled up and turned the switch on and nothing it was dead i knew the battery was charged so i figured the battery must be unhooked so i loaded back up and went home this is what i found when i got back!!! any idea what would cause this (hopefully the pics will download!)

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The battery shorted. That's what caused the heat and all the damage to the battery. It could have been caused by two wires touching each other, and could have possibly been caused by overcharging as well. But I doubt it was that.

Ken

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What does the receiver look like?

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the receiver was fine i already have a new battery hooked to it and it works fine i flew for about 10 minutes the previous night and then the next night i charged for about a hour or longer and then went flying and thats when i found this problem since you mentioned over charge let me ask this say if you have a full charge and plan on going flying and then say it rains and you cant go then the next night its good flying weather and you can go should you charge before you go or will it be charged enough to fly from the day before?

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Joco1,
You're fine doing what you said. It's a good practice to get in to charge the night before you fly whenever possible. Doing this isn't going to hurt your batteries. When I said overcharged above I meant trying to charge the batteries too fast, or too high of a voltage when charging. But like I said, it doesn't look like that is the case. Usually when this happens you can see a cell that is split as it bursts out. From what I can see in the pictures that didn't happen. Rather, it looks like there was a short which caused your problems.

Ken

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What was the capacity of that battery?

And what type of charger and charge rate did you use?

And as said it could also be simple mechanical short of the battery wiring, which has and could happen.

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it was a 4.8 ni cad battery and i was just useing the spektrum wall charger that came with my dx7 radio not sure the capacity of the battery

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If you were using the wall wart charger it's HIGHLY unlikely that you did this to the pack from charging. As was said, it's more than likely a mechanical short in the pack. Someplace the two wires touched each other and fried your pack.

Ken

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thanks for the info im starting to think im not supposed to fly this super stick!!!

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Usually when a short like this happens the wires will "weld" themselves together where they touched. You may be to carefully dissect the pack and find out exactly where the short is. This is actually a good thing to do because you need to know what caused it. If it was something in the pack and wiring that is fried (what's shown in the picture) and you know that you won't have any further problems. But if you can't find the short in what's shown above you NEED to keep researching to find what caused this so that it doesn't happen again with a new pack. While you did successfully fly today with a new pack that doesn't mean the cause can't still be there. I had a flying buddy have exactly the same problem you are having. He fried two packs and couldn't figure out what was causing it, but continued to fly. When the 3 pack fried we discovered that where he was placing it in the fuselage had a screw protruding which eventually poked through the battery padding and the heat shrink around the pack to short it out. Luckily all 3 fried on the ground, but it could just have easily have happened in the air. So you really should take the time to investigate and find the cause of the short.

Ken

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I've had some serious issues with the Spektrum receiver batteries. I bought several brand new ones at an IMAA fly-in and several more off of eBay based on my initial good impressions of them. My positive opinion didn't last long. Just over half of them were bad. some would only hold 300mAh or so when cycled and others were shorted and would do nothing. I threw the rest out and pulled out the ones I had installed into airplanes. Several other club members have talked about similar problems.

I love my DX-7 radio but their Ni-cad receiver batteries scare me.

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Looks exactly like my battery pack and wiring after a crash I had. It was definitely a short that caused it as it started smoking / smoldering as we were walking up to the remains. So I would have to agree and vote for shortage rather than a charging problem.

flynte

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what brand do you prefer or like the best now chuck?

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I'm not necessarily against Spektrum branded batteries but I am very suspect of the 1100mAh packs that come with the radios. I've had good luck with JR packs. The LHS usually stocks them so I own a few 1400mAh packs. I would think they'd use similar cells as Spektrum but apparently not. I've also had good luck with Futaba packs and the Hobbico NiMh packs.

I hear these are pretty good too but I haven't bought from them myself yet:

http://www.hangtimes.com/nobsbatteries.html

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looking at your pictures it seems that the wires coming from the pack before the shrink wrap got the most heat and melted all the insulation off the wire. In my opinion this is the area in which the short occured that also caused the batteries to overheat and melt the pack. The other wire damage looks like it recived heating by being in contact with the melting battery and was not involved directly with the short. was the battery pack modified or have the connector soldered on as aftermarket?

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no everything was original the only thing that might have caused it now i think was that i had the wire wrapped kinda tight around the battery with a piece of black tape in the fuselodge to keep them from laying loose

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I don't have a spectrum radio but one of my flying buddies does. He lost a plane (TT Staudecker (SP?)) due to the receiver battery dying the plane went right through the roof of a trailer. I lent him a 3000 mah battery and when he went to plug in the battery he plugged it in the wrong slot and actually plugged it into 3 negative pins that shorted out the battery and fused 2 of the pins into the battery connector. to me its a bad setup for the battery connector.