Jolly good; still curious, though.

Dave M

Futaba like to be different while still appearing to be within general standards. For years past, while everybody else used 1.5mS as the standard for "off" or stick center, Futaba preferred to use 1.25mS. Again, for everybody else, a longer pulse meant forward, a shorter one reverse. Futaba, the opposite.

For anybody not having Futaba gear, not a problem until you get an ESC designed by somebody working to the Futaba standard. As Ashley says, quite often you need to "train" an ESC to "learn" your transmitter. It expects to "see" three things. First is the neutral, then forward, then reverse. If it gets them in the wrong order, what happens is anybody's guess, but if it doesn't respond as expected, the best thing to do is start over, but set the throttle channel reverse switch on the TX to the opposite of what it was the first time.

David

I have a similar problem

Using Four MFA 850 motors on 7,2 volts…….One motor only…….Gets hot very quickly and also runs lovely going in reverse but not going forward

I like Malcom's story, but it doesn't quite fit my set up?

ie……Three motors ok and one rogue motor?

Bob

Why do they say this?

I give up, Bob – what's the answer? In the light of your experience it's clearly nonsense so why would MTroniks – who manufactured your four speed controllers – include it in their instructions? I think it's time you told us experts where we're all going wrong, Bob.

I do know, and I've given the answer more than once on this forum and in my articles.

I offer my advice freely in the hope that it will help others to avoid trouble; it's not for some monstrous ego trip or the thrill of seeing my name on a computer screen. You seem "unabell" to appreciate this. I'm not about to repeat myself yet again simply for your amusement, except to say that just because you've avoided problems while ignoring advice thus far doesn't make them any less likely to happen in the future.

Part of me hopes they do, but I won't be the one to say 'I told you'.

Bob

Are all of your red wires connected to the RC

Paul

Paul

Yes……All the wires are connected

If I cut the wires to three of them, I would not be able to run an individual motor, without first connecting the intact wire

At the moment, I can run any of the motors…….Which has been handy lately

Bob

Bob,

As Dave says, this has been explained on numerous occasions. Each red wire is a separate power supply from the speed controller to the receiver. In an ideal world, when using more than one speed controller the outputs will all be identical but because of various factors including manufacturing tolerances the separate loads being placed on the speed controllers by the motors etc., in practice the supply voltage can fluctuate and because everything is interconnected there're is a very real potential for the electronics to become unbalanced and generate unwanted feedback as a result of which one of the components may get fried. It obviously makes sense to power the receiver from one power source, either a separate battery (my preference) or one speed controller.

In a sense you are already experiencing a not dissimilar problem with your twin motor one shaft setups. The two motors should perform identically but in practice they don't because they have differing manufacturing tolerances and the pole positions are probably out of synch so they don't act exactly in unison when power is applied. They are fighting each other.

Your setup may indeed appear to be working OK but what you can't see is the internal stresses it may be putting on the electronics. When the device self destructs the manufacturer gets blamed which is why they use red ink in the instructions as Dave has illustrated above.

Colin

PS: If you want to run the motors selectively then just use a separate receiver supply, you only need 4 AA cells for that. Then you can switch the motors in an out to your heart's content.

Colin

Well, it may be possible Bob, but 100,000+ ton cruise ships not infrequently suffer total electrical blackouts due to their 'speed controllers' getting their electronic unmentionables in a twist when trying to balance the loadings on them so what hope is there for a £25 model controller made up of a few cheap Chinese components?

Colin