RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

A few days ago I got a new Heng Long Tiger upgraded(metal tracks, metal front and back gears and metal gear box) which I first used today with the battery fully charged. The tank only goes a few feet and fire once before it goes into standby mode. Standby mode as in the mode where the headlights are flashing which the tank is waiting for the signal from the controller to activate. Once it does that I active it again and after a minute I try to get it to move. The moment I push the movement control the tank makes an effort to move, but in less than a second it goes back into standby. It does the same thing when I try to fire it. The machine gun works but the cannon causes it to die the moment it's about to make the noise.

To see if the problem was the tank I had the battery still connected, but it also connected to the charger as well. When I did that the tank was doing each function fine without going into standby unless I hit the button for it. Is this problem caused by a bad stock battery or does my tank have some issue with it where it's not draining the battery correctly?

It can be several things, but the battery could be the cause. What battery and charger? The standard hl is either nicd or nimh, may even be lipo. Many nicd batts comes as yellow, many nimh in green. The nicd can and should be completely discharged before recharged. Nimh only to a low voltage or u can shorten its lifetime - as in almost empty. Cant remember the exact voltage.
Both of thes batteries will likely need a couple of cycles before they are at a decent capacity. Especially some of the older ones. If fx u purchased a 27mhz tank it may have been on some shelf for years and the battery will need some massage to get back to life. Charge a couple of times. Remember once the package is slightly warm it is not charging anymore. First times for an old pack it may false peak and act as fully charged. Cycle it and it may get better.

Hope this helps.

Regards Claus

clfr98ad wrote:It can be several things, but the battery could be the cause. What battery and charger? The standard hl is either nicd or nimh, may even be lipo. Many nicd batts comes as yellow, many nimh in green. The nicd can and should be completely discharged before recharged. Nimh only to a low voltage or u can shorten its lifetime - as in almost empty. Cant remember the exact voltage.
Both of thes batteries will likely need a couple of cycles before they are at a decent capacity. Especially some of the older ones. If fx u purchased a 27mhz tank it may have been on some shelf for years and the battery will need some massage to get back to life. Charge a couple of times. Remember once the package is slightly warm it is not charging anymore. First times for an old pack it may false peak and act as fully charged. Cycle it and it may get better.

Hope this helps.

Regards Claus

I have no idea what type the charger is but for the battery it says 7.4v/1800mAh and the model is HL 18650-2S.

Hi BC,

I would say it's almost certainly the battery, I had the same problem a while back with a battery I had received as part of a purchase, fully charged before use and saying that on a digital charger it lasted all of about a minute, I swapped it out for one of my well used and fully charged batteries and it worked like a dream. I would say that if possible invest in a decent charger and battery combo and you should find that all will be fine, good advice from Claus about cycling the stock battery as well to try and regenerate it if you decide to stick with the original one HTH,

Cheers, Lee.

scalawag wrote:

BerzerkCommando wrote:

clfr98ad wrote:It can be several things, but the battery could be the cause. What battery and charger? The standard hl is either nicd or nimh, may even be lipo. Many nicd batts comes as yellow, many nimh in green. The nicd can and should be completely discharged before recharged. Nimh only to a low voltage or u can shorten its lifetime - as in almost empty. Cant remember the exact voltage.
Both of thes batteries will likely need a couple of cycles before they are at a decent capacity. Especially some of the older ones. If fx u purchased a 27mhz tank it may have been on some shelf for years and the battery will need some massage to get back to life. Charge a couple of times. Remember once the package is slightly warm it is not charging anymore. First times for an old pack it may false peak and act as fully charged. Cycle it and it may get better.

Hope this helps.

Regards Claus

I have no idea what type the charger is but for the battery it says 7.4v/1800mAh and the model is HL 18650-2S.

From the battery model number that sounds like the new Lithium Ion batteries (these are not LiPos) that are beginning to ship with H/L tanks. Does it have a balance lead as well as the lead that plugs into the tank? A pic of the battery would be good in order to confirm this. It does sound like a problem with the battery. I would go back to the vendor and ask for a replacement battery.

Paul

You will only get around 15 mins good running time from the stock batteries. If you buy one with a higher mah rating it will last a lot longer. I use 3700mah Nimh's as they give around an hour, and can be recharged quickly on a 4amp charger. Low voltage detection will stop the tank at 6v, so a fully charged battery will put out 8.4v then drop quickly to around 7.2v, then maintain that as long as it can.

Quality batteries are designed to output around 7v for a long time, rather than keep dropping the power. One battery will happily last a club meet, and sometimes two, even driving a heavy tank.

A battery charger should really be a peak detect one. It detects when the battery is fully charged and then drops back to a trickle charge so that the battery doesn't get overcharged, which will damage it.

Having tried various brands and found them to be of different quality, I now use Vapextech ones, purely because I have used them and they do the job. Avoid the cheap Chinese ones on Ebay, they claim all sorts of Mah ratings but they are nothing of the sort, they are low Mah and poor quality, and don't power a tank for five minutes. There are loads of threads on here about batteries, so it might be worth ploughing through them to gain an insight into what is what.

https://www.batterystuff.com/kb/article ... ttery.html

The problem was simply due to the battery not being fully charged. I figured once the light turned green it was done but that's not the case. I'm still going to get a new battery though due to only about 10 minutes of fun.