Goodies arrived yesterday.
Race is Sunday, but I'm hoping to get a few practice laps tomorrow evening.
So far, here's what I'm thinking...
The good stuff:
- It really exists! Really!
- It weighs only 1/4 oz or so more than the ThunderPower 5000 I use in my link car. Considering the extra case and wire, I considered that pretty impressive. The overall weight of my 12R5.1 vs. my FF07 is within 5g or so. Nice!
- It fit in the chassis without requiring any changes to the body height.
- Chassis balanced out perfectly. (after hearing folks with Reedy 1s packs complain about the battery not being symmetrical in weight, I didn't take this for granted)
- It came with some convenient little carbon blocks to tape/goo to the chassis to hold the pack in position. Very thoughtful touch!
- Charged it up and it's ready to go.
The "if I ruled the world..." stuff:
- Wire is thicker than necessary. Maybe 12ga? This is pretty much only going to be used in 1/12 scale, and is by definition only going to be a 3.7v application. 16ga would seem more appropriate. Seems to work fine for my Mod car and for everyone else I know locally. The other 1s packs I've seen have thick wire too, so this isn't totally unexpected or unusual. But the extra wires of the saddle pack make it even more difficult to figure out how to make it fit.
- Wire is MUCH longer than necessary. Especially the saddle wires. I actually tried to rotate one pack so that the wire came out on the outboard side, using up the extra length. But there isn't enough clearance for the thick wire under the body on the outside edge. In the meantime, I Shoe-Goo'd the wires to the top of the battery to try to keep the arch low. Otherwise the arch of thick wire would just be sky-high, pushing on the body. I also had to make an odd loop in the SC plug wire to take up the room for the battery plug wire to run without too much binding. I might shorten the wires eventually, but since it is a brand new Lipo pack I decided to make it fit as-is for now and make sure it works OK before doing something potentially a bit risky.
So, other than futzing with the wire layout a bit (which is a pretty minor gripe) I'm excited to see how she runs!
Neal