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Electric Stunt => Gettin all AMP'ed up! => Topic started by: bfrog on October 16, 2009, 05:49:44 PM
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Somewhere I read that it is not a good idea to shorten the leads on either or both the motor or the ESC. On my small profile carrier plane that means I have a knot of wires just bundled on the side of the fuselage. This just creates more drag and is very unsightly. It's got a thin foam wing so it's hard to bury the electrics inside of either the wing or the fuselage. Less wire would be advantages.
Does anyone have any experience cutting down motor or ESC leads and if so what are the considerations/trade-offs?
Thanks for any help.
Bob
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Take a look at Mike Palko's sticky note.
The trouble with cutting off the motor wires is that - the only to replace them is to re-wind the motor! Thus shorten only the ESC side. If needed you can replace those. You can also shorten the harnessing by soldering the ESC leads directly to the mtor leads and eliminate the bullet connectors. Kind of a PITA but it will buy you about 1" of harness shortening...
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Bob,
Shortening the wires in principle is ok.
Now for the issues.
Some motors--like the Scorpion for example, bring out the actual windings to the connector. Which means that if you cut them, you need to strip off the enamel coating. Again not a big deal---if one winding turn was one wire. But actually Scorpion uses many strands of fine wire in each turn, so the net result in this case is that you will have a very large number of enameled fine wires to strip--and you might not be sure if you really stripped off the enamel on every tiny strand. So for example on a Scorpion 3020-890, each wind is actually 14 strands of 30 gauge wire, and each connector has two phases worth, so there would be 28 fine wires to each connector that you would need to strip. And remember there are 3 connectors!
There is a technique to strip these things---apparently a melted (by heat) aspirin will dissolve the enamel. The fumes are claimed to be pretty acrid, so don't breathe the fumes!
However if your motor has normal insulated flexible wire coming out to the connector, then you are home free. Feel free to cut it and the ESC leads as short as you want!
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Thanks guys. That answers the question. I can do some trimming and save some wire mess and weight.
It also made me realize I can so some further connector elimination and save even more. I always try and leave things as they are so I can use parts in other applications later but in this case it will be a permanent and fixed arrangement now that I have the bugs worked out.