Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Reviving an Old Nitro glow plug Radio Controlled Car..

My brother passed me his 2 year old Kyosho RC car.. The great thing was that it was FOC, and even greater was the fact that it was a nitro Glow plug engine car! THe bad news was that he had not run it for the past two years. We found out after i took it out of the box that the engine had seized..
Finally got some 25% Nitro from the local toycity Ipoh parade, a few days back. Cost me 30 ringgit for half a litre! Decided to seriously try to get the car moving again.
Took me a night to partially disassemble the engine .. The crankcase had seized, due to lots of gooey stuff in it.. WD 40 the whole thing, then it was ok.. The piston and crank was nice and loose.. When i tried to start it, the starter section also stuck.. had to clean that also, and apparently the pull start bearing also jam.. WD40 also don't seem to work that well.. After getting things slightly loose, Reassembled the engine onto the car, poured some 25% nitro into the tank, primed it and after a few pulls, everything got loose.. Realized that the best thing to get the stuff loose was the nitro itself.. Still.. no ignition.. Removed engine heatsink and checked out the glowplug.. Apparently, The paint on the heatsink was the problem, Crocodile clips of the starter battery wasn't heating up the plug.. A little scratching later, glowplug lit up well.. After that, a little priming.. and vroom vroom.. engine started.. Quite fun to play, but the road outside my house is really too rough for the GT car.. looking for some better paved roads..Either that or get some buggy tyres for the car.. Al in all .. Good fun.. The sound of the engine is AWESOME.. Just like the sound of F! cars on TV.. The best part was starting the car after rebuilding the engine.. Its like resuscitating a dying patient back to life. HA HA!!

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