RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Rad_Schuhart wrote:I've seen plenty videos of lipos exploding, but I dont know exactly why they do it. But good to know they dont explode for overdischarging...

I've had three go up on me over the years, always because of a short at the connector.

One 1C tried to blow torch a hole in my thigh, luckily I got it out of my pocket literally as I was about to get in the car for a drive home. It did it's lttle pyro show on the pavement.

Another 2C started down that path as I stood in the middle of my shop, 3 floors up. In a split second my mind flashed the options, throw out the window yelling 'Achtung!' or sticking it in a metal bin and running down the stairs. Fortunately within reaching distance was a pair of cutters and I snipped the wires off before the flames. It was a nice warm puffy ball though.

Personally, I think they're the safest when being charged since I'm watching them. It's when I'm driving and they're in the back or sitting in the shop that I fear the roman candle.

I changed all my lipos to Castle connectors to help avoid that. 4mm for the tanks, 6.5mm for the RC cars and 8mm bullets for the 5th scale.

Rad_Schuhart wrote:I've seen plenty videos of lipos exploding, but I dont know exactly why they do it. But good to know they dont explode for overdischarging...

They can do it for several reasons but as long as you get good quality lipos, treat them well I.e. unplug by holding the connector not the cable, not dropping them and charging at 1c, it's hard to go wrong. The way to kill them with discharging is to have a motor which pulls more amps than the battery is capable of. Pretty hard to so in an RC tank but easy enough with a 200amp ESC and large motor with poor batteries.