Kaos

My son owns an Axe CP with the NiMh battery packs. Right from the get-go, he could not get much flight time out of the battery - perhaps 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. The original wall-wart charger would only charge for about 8 minutes before going into the flashing green LED mode (meaning that it thinks the battery is fully charged, I guess).

Out of frustration, my son ordered 7 original type NiMh batteries from Tower, plus 2 more original type wall-wort chargers. Amazingly, they respond the same way. Flight times are still 30 seconds at worst and maybe 3 minutes at best (this, after repeated charge attempts to "fool" the charger into charging more).

Is this the best he can expect from these batteries? I would think the new NiMh packs would deliver at least 8 minutes or so and I would also guess that it would take the wall-wort charger maybe 20 or 30 minutes to fully charge the batteries, which they are not doing.

I think the battery packs in question contain AAA batteries and have a Deans connector. My son also owns an Accu-Cycle battery charger, but does not have the corrector cables for the Deans-equipped flight packs, and I'm not sure the Accu-Cycle can safely charge AAA packs.

Any thoughts?

-Kaos

A. J. Clark

It would be hard to believe after 7 more batteries and 2 chargers that the problem is either one.
Sounds more like the ESC, motor, or the wires and connectors between them.
What type of motor do you have.

PilotLight

My Feedback: (1)

There are three different types of Accucycle chargers. Depending on which one he has, he can use it to check and charge the batteries. The Accucycle was the original and can only charge up to eight cells of Nimh. Your battery pack has nine in the Axe. The Accucycle plus has the same restriction only it included a AC power supply and would cycle the batteries up to 3 times. Finally, the Accucycle Elite is capable of charging up to 10 cells so if he has this model it could be used if you could make or find a connector.

The Nimh packs were originally sold with the Axe CP about 3 or 4 years ago. Then, they upgraded to Lipoly batteries. I'll bet those batteries have been sitting on a shelf waiting to be sold and are probably no good. You could check the voltage with a volt/ohm meter. If you have about 12 volts, they should be good, if they are 10.8 or less, they are about dead.

My Nimh packs took over an hour to charge with the stock charger and I could hover in ground effect and bounce off the skids for about 5 minutes. I upgraded quickly to Lipos.

rcollector

I had only flown with lipos till I bought a couple of axe's from tower's scratch and dent section a while back that came with nimhs . The longest flight times I saw with nimhs were three to 3 1/2 minutes.