Cordless nitro heli starter

In preparation to my future nitro helicopter, I was looking at my old plane starter and I decided to mod it a little to use an old Align 3s 11.1v lipo pack that I don't use anymore on my T-Rex 450, because its a little puffy and it wasn't lasting really long.


After reading several posts on this subject from people saying that a 3S lipo pack had enough power to start a 50 nitro heli engine, I simply cut the wire of my old plane starter and soldered a dean plug to it at about 2 inches and I used my dremel to remove some plastic on the bottom of the starter to make some room for the lipo pack that I strap to the starter using some velro bands. I also soldered the other part of the dean plug to the old starter wire, so I can still plug it to my field 12v battery if needed.

It looks pretty cool in my opinion and I tried it on my old .75 SuperTiger plane engine and it works very good. Since I dont have a nitro heli yet, I can't be absolutly sure it will work ok, but I really dont see why it wouldn't work.

Anyway, it was a really easy mod to do and it didn't cost me anything because I had all the required parts laying around.

Here is what it looks like:

Recycling an old PC power supply

In the October 2008 issue of RC Heli magazine, there was a great article about modding an old ATX PC power supply into a multi purpose 12v power supply.

Since I read this article, I wanted to give it a try and in the last days, I finally had some spare time to do it. I followed the article carefully and a few hours later, I have this great 10amps 12v power supply:

It was a really easy mod. All I had to do was cut some wires inside the power supply and solder some leds, a swicth and banana plugs. I decided to do it the fancy way using leds and stuff because I already had all of that in my toolbox, but some could do this same mod without all the bling and still get a nice cheap power supply.

PC power supplies are often rated at least 10A and many of the recent ones are even rated at 15-20A. So if you have one laying around or if you know someone who is getting rid of an old computer, chances are you can get yourself a great 12v power supply for almost nothing!

The ironic thing is that I don't even need a 12v power supply for my RC stuff, because I only use the Align lipo charger/balancer that came with my T-Rex 450 and is already has a 110V cord, but it could always be useful and I couldn't resist doing this mod :)