How To?

Follow practical how-to articles from Radical RC on batteries, building, test flying, crash analysis, swap meets and workshop techniques.

Choosing an RC Glow Plug: Heat Range, Length and Idle Bars

A glow plug is about the cheapest part in your airplane and the one most likely to leave you standing in the pits pulling on a prop. We sell a lot of them and we get asked about them constantly, so here is how we sort them out at the shop. What a Glow Plug Actually...

Picking an RC Engine Starter: Engine Size, Battery and Cones

A starter that is too small for the engine will not turn it through compression. You stand there cooking the motor and the battery while nothing happens. Matching the starter to the engine is most of the job, and the battery behind it is most of the rest. Here is how...

Balancing Severely Out of Balance A123 Pack

The following is a recent exchange discussing some charging logic that is impacted often by time-out settings in chargers. Not a bad thing all in all. The same logic can be applied to Lipo packs as well. Hi, Dave: Here’s my situation: All of my A123 batteries...

Scratch Building: Transfer A Drawing To Wood

We’re converting a Hobby Lobby Telemaster into a 1928 Fairchild FC-2W2 for a National Parks Service program. This aircraft was the first ever owned by NASA and later the first owned by the National Parks Service. Information link at bottom. While making a...

Crash Investigation, Why did it crash?

Just as in full scale aviation, crashes are often because of a sequence of things going wrong. I received a letter recently asking my opinion on a set of circumstances. At the time of this writing there is no 100% sure answer, not enough info is provided, however...