I was tinkering with the car and wanted to center the servo quickly to do alignment. I flipped on the transmitter and turned back to the car. I have a battery with inboard bullet connectors. You probably know where this is going... I reversed the + and - bullet connectors when I connected the battery.

"Hmmm that was a big spark"

"Oh shit smoke!"

I yanked the wires out of the battery before it got worse.

The red battery wire was so hot that it desoldered from the bullet connector as well as from the ESC.

Questions:

1. Is it even worth bothering to hook the ESC up again correctly to see if it works? Do I risk hurting my receiver, battery, motor, etc? ESC has no visible damage other than the missing red wire. It's a Hobbywing Justock.

2. Is it risky to keep using that battery? The hardcase lipo 2s battery got warm but not hot. There is no visible swelling or melted plastic. It was 3.8V per cell before the incident and still tests at 3.8V afterwards.

My instinct is to harvest the ESC for reusable parts and then trash it, but to keep the battery.

Just wondering what more experienced hands think. I haven't done anything this stupid since I overcharged an MRC NiCd in 1985. Needless to say, I'm reverting to polarized connectors.

ESC shows about 6k ohms between + and - input terminals.

I did that once. Maybe to a lesser extent because I didn't plug it all the way in, but it did smoke and it did get super hot. The speed control wasn't even on and it still sparked. The battery and speed control are both fine. If you try it just be really cautious.

valuable experience,I hope i can avoid this situation in future.
Thank you!

Definitely wire it back up and see if it works. The battery should be fine, would take a lot more than that to mess it up.

Soldered it back up, and it works perfectly. Hobbywing makes some tough hardware!

With that kinda luck, I'd head to the Casino!!!

Well I crapped out.
Turns out it works fine on the bench, but with some load on it, it can't start the motor. It will run if you give it a bump to get started, but even then it's a little rough. Oh well, at least it was a cheap ESC, and I have a Novak Edge I can throw in there for tomorrow's race.

As I was reading down the post, I was saying to myself that you ought to play the horses since you were so lucky. Then I got down to this last post..So disregard and stay away from Hollywood park.

We've all done it before at some point in the past and I feel your pain. I did it on a hobby wing xerun 1/8 150a. Same as you it worked on the bench for awhile when I hooked it back up. Then stopped completed with even more smoke! I did send it back to hobbywing and they repaired it. Sorry I can't remember how much I paid but I do remember that they replaced the power board that the reverse polarity had fried.