Day 2988

 Ellen got up before 8 and did the pet stuff.  I stayed in bed and played games for a while.  When I got up I had breakfast and then surfed.  There wasn't anything on the plate for today.  I did plan on taking Abby to Circle C in the afternoon.

The stuff I ordered yesterday was delivered mid-morning.  I decided to install the new servo, because it was a "quick, easy, task".  Of course it turned out to be a bit of a pain.  The new servo is a millimeter or so longer than the old one.  Unfortunately the brass servo mount was very tight.  It took a little elbow grease to get the new servo to fit.

When that was done I decided I might as well install the gears and gearbox bearings.  getting the gearbox out of the rig wasn't very hard and neither was getting the gearbox apart.  I made sure to take a picture of the inside of the gearbox before I took the gears out.  Removing the bushings was a bitch.  There are 6.  Two came out with a little effort, two took a lot of work to remove, and two didn't want to come out at all.  I ended up taking the gearbox end out to the garage and using a heavy hex wrench to lever them out.

Putting everything back together took some effort, too.  The pinion was press on.  I had to remove the motor, lever the old pinion off, and press the new one on.  Pressing the bearings in also took some effort.  I reinstalled the motor and swapped the gear shafts to the new gears.  I unknowingly mixed up one gear.  It took a while to figure that out.  After that I had trouble closing the gear box because the gear shafts wouldn't fit into the bearings.  I had to tap them gently to get them to seat.

I installed heat shrink over the o-rings in all four universal joints.  That worked out well because I had the heat gun to shrink the tubing.  Putting the gearbox back in the frame was relatively easy also.

With that done I tested everything.  It all worked.  That's when I discovered that the servo wasn't the source of the limited steering.  It's the transmitter.  It's a piece of crap.  You can't set the end points and it limits the servo movement so the servo doesn't bind up.  It had to go.

That meant ordering at least an ESC.  I spent a long time analyzing different options.  Should I buy stuff for both the FMS and Traaxas, or only one?  Should I buy the Furitek transmissions to go with them?  Should I buy the "cheap" FMS motor/ESC combo or the expensive one.  I learned that I can buy good quality metal transmissions for both vehicles from Amazon for much less than the Furitek price.  I decided to get the higher cost motor/ESC combos for both vehicles.

I also spent a lot of time finding a 3S battery that would fit all three vehicles.  There aren't a lot that fit the criteria because all three vehicles have very different battery compartments.  

I ordered everything from Amain.  Unfortunately I only got $10 off rather than $20.  They changed their discounts for February.

Ellen fixed General Tso's chicken for dinner.  The weather alarm went off warning of heavy thunderstorms with high winds and hail.  I put the car in the garage, had dinner, and started watching videos.

Later on the storm came through.  It rained heavily, but luckily there wasn't high winds and hail.  We got .83 inch of rain in under an hour.