Waterproof sloper

[st]

Anyone ever made a waterproof sloper?

I imagine the electrics bay would be easy enough to do, but the servo's not so.

I've just spent a couple of weeks on holidays at Tallebudgera. I reckon some of the large rock walls down the gold coast (such as the one for Tallebudgera creek) would provide good DS'ing! Would need a waterproof plane though for the occasional dip though! Spectators would be a pain too!

Anyone flown from the SE side of Burleigh Heads? Large steep hill must have awesome lift. Only problem is no landing zone, aside hand catch at a walking track lookout, or the sand below.....

[skyboyken]

I used to do rc boats. The best you can hope to achieve is to survive a short dunking undamaged I think.

We used to put the Rx in a balloon (or condom) and silicon up the neck as well as tying with a wire tie. Any plugs need to be silicon'ed together.

For the servos you really need factory waterproofed ones to do it properly because they need an o-ring seal around the output gear. You can however do a pretty good job by taking the case apart and smearing silicon around all the joins plus the wiring exit. That may survive a short dunking but for prolonged exposure to salt water all bets are off.

The toughest part is the switch. If you use a standard switch you can put it inside a balloon like the Rx but that can be awkward.

If the plane does get dunked in salt water the first thing to do is turn off the power, followed absolutely as soon as possible by rinsing everything in fresh water, including the Rx itself if ANY salt water got in. Then if there has been any water ingrees, remove the gear from the plane and put in a warm oven (about 80 -100 C) for 30 mins to dry it out. Then you can see if it's still working or not.

This procedure works for boats running in salt water but there are no guarantees, it won't always work.

I hope this is of some use to you .

Go Great!

[felix]

i was thinking bout this yesterday myself.....my solution would be to do away with exposed control rods and servo arms and use golden rods.
by having the servos and arms sealed and just the rods coming through half the problem would be solved,to stop the water seeping through the tube you could possibly use a couple of well oiled "o" rings in a carved recess on the inner rod to form a seal between the inner and outer (finding some this small would be a problem but my guess is a carby reco buisness would be the best bet?) or even easier is to fill the outer rod with plenty of grease (vaseline,wheel bearing,etc) and the push the inner through.this would be more than capable of being water tight.
cheap and very simple ;D

[thevon]

I've waterproofed my Duck or Bee just by colour taping over everything, switch included. Worked well for me with several dunkings. If the covering job is good it's pretty close to waterproof then you just put some patches over the exposed bits. The only hassle is that the LMA doesn't make any noise with tape over it.

When Nick dunked our Bee at SC the other day we hadn't done this ... soon as it happened we flushed it with fresh water, put in in the sun and wind, but the switch was beggared and we had to replace it.

[felix]

oops looks like i posted a little too late ;D
good idea to put the receiver in a balloon though! (maybe another use for a franger too haha)

[thevon]

Hmm, yep I forgot about the servos when I did that reply, but I've never had a servo stuff up after dunking a plane. Only had about 4 dunks and they've been cheap servos.