Sometimes You Feel Like a Dork

And sometimes you wish you didn't. Ok, most of the time I wish I didn't. But I'm glad I got it out of the way before I really felt like a dork. Here's how it is:

I finally started posting pictures of my KAP rig to Flickr. Good thing, too. Brooks Leffler made a number of comments on various aspects of my rig. One concerned battery weight. I have a quad AA holder with four AA batteries in it. 110g. Brooks suggested replacing it with a quad 2/3 AAA NiMH pack. That drops the battery weight down by more than half. For a 700g rig, that's a lot.

Another area I'm trying to trim weight is the servos. I started with three Futaba S28 servos at 55g apiece. I replaced the shutter and tilt servos with Futaba S3003 servos, dropping those two to 34g. The plan now is to install a TowerPro SG50 as the shutter servo (5.5g), take the S3003 I have on the shutter now and move it to pan (55g drops to 34g) and dump my total shutter mass from 123g down to 73.5g. Between this and the battery mod, I can shave well over 110g off my rig's weight. A little more judicious trimming and I can get a 700g rig down to half a kilo. It may not sound like much, but given the kites I have it opens up a lot more wind range.

But the real kicker came later: I posted pictures of my Picavet, which is the thing the whole rig hangs from. I've never really felt comfortable with it because it hangs from a single gear on a servo. All 700g of it. There's plenty of thread engagement, but it's still just steel threaded into nylon that's holding things in place.

Brooks commented on the picture and pointed out that I'd utterly missed a major part of the construction manual for the BBKK: the part where the servo gear is modified so it has a #4-40 threaded screw installed with the head on the inside of the servo, so all the weight is being borne by a metal-on-nylon shoulder rather than metal-on-nylon threads. As he put it, it's about 1000% more secure than what I'm running now.

Which makes me feel a whole heckuva lot better about how my rig will be after I modify it tonight! Months of flying, and the thing has never let go. So with this mod I figure I can fly forever and it'll never let go. Yeeha!

But...

Dang, don't I feel like a dork! Brooks asked if I'd read the manual. Well yeah, I did. Mostly. Sort of. Except the part about that screw installation because it was confusing...

Cripes, but how many tech support analysts can tell stories like that one? "You wouldn't believe this guy! He didn't wear a grounding strap because he said it was 'confusing', and now he's blown $100k in electronics to ESD hell! What a jerk!"

Yep. That's me. I read the manual, and skipped the confusing parts...

Which is why, I guess, a friend gave me a poster many years ago. "Mistakes - It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."

Let ye be warned! Don't be like me!

The postscript to all this, though, is that my rig never fell, and now that I'm embarrassed but wiser, it never will.

Tom