Glow Plug Battery

akjgardner wrote:I removed the old cells from this cox battery pack and soldered in 4 new d cells.Works like a champ and takes me back to the seventies.

Ken Cook wrote:I was buying 2 Hobbico batteries and I joined two of them together which yielded use for a season  worth of flying between two people. The batteries however were going up in price and two of them were costing me nearly $20. The lifespan of the last ones I purchased were incredibly short which had me switch to a much nicer and more accurate power panel. Not everyone wants to deal with that. I use to use the old #6 drycell. They seemed to last an incredibly long time and I would get a long life span out of them. Due to the lack of need they were discontinued. F cells which came with the Hobbico battery were the replacement. The battery manufacturers have reintroduced the vintage #6 battery again. I'm looking forward to using it again Excell is the manufacturer ENO 6.

akjgardner wrote:I removed the old cells from this cox battery pack and soldered in 4 new d cells.Works like a champ and takes me back to the seventies.

fredvon4 wrote:There is always the option to down load the original Ray-O-vac  or  Ever-Ready outer cover, print it, and make a single cell looking old skool battery but with modern chemistry inside. The inter web has many different schematics for constant volt or constant current regulators to keep a 1.5Vdc~ 2Vdc glow plug happy with any of the NiMH/LiPo/LIFE source voltages

I am not hung up on nostalgia too much and really prefer these four different approaches to lighting off glow plugs:


1. Hobbieco Deluxe Power Panel II driven by a 12Vdc 7Ahr to 9 Ahr lead acid battery...My BIG flight box
2. Cyclon 5Ahr 2Vdc primary cell with a long length of wire to drop the voltage slightly...My little flight box
3. RCATS smart Lithium glow driver (expensive but is the best ever glow driver I have seen)...For competition use
4. Gang of 2 DuraCell D Cells in parallel ....used for bench testing only

balogh wrote:

fredvon4 wrote:

I had had all the frustration of the world before I built this up, with the D-type batteries getting weak too soon, rechargeables not giving out more than 1,2Volts while COX heads run on 1,5Volts, and now the Hobbyco panel combines everything I need in the field, and need to recharge the battery only every second month or so...(even my old COX plugs not wanting to glow on standard 1,5V alkaline batteries anymore could be brought back to service thanks to the variable glow current output from the panel).

So with the Hobbico panel can one adjust the glow current in tenths of a volt like 1.5V, 1.6V, 1.7V etc.?

Sig Skyray wrote:

balogh wrote:

fredvon4 wrote:

I had had all the frustration of the world before I built this up, with the D-type batteries getting weak too soon, rechargeables not giving out more than 1,2Volts while COX heads run on 1,5Volts, and now the Hobbyco panel combines everything I need in the field, and need to recharge the battery only every second month or so...(even my old COX plugs not wanting to glow on standard 1,5V alkaline batteries anymore could be brought back to service thanks to the variable glow current output from the panel).

So with the Hobbico panel can one adjust the glow current in tenths of a volt like 1.5V, 1.6V, 1.7V etc.?

Sig Skyray wrote:For a Cox .049, are you guys using the glow plug adapters that accept the insert-type glow plugs that then take the glow drivers?  Don't know what you call those types of plugs but their the one's used in the larger RC plane engines.  

Don't want to complicate things too early on here just getting back into it, but if I'm considering a Hobbico Panel I might as well get it all figured out before I start buying things :-)

Greg

GallopingGhostler wrote:This is my current starter battery.