The Journey of RC Car Engineering: A Story of Troubleshooting and Triumph
Another day, another problem. At this point, we can get the engine spinning, but the fuel just isn't igniting. This could be for a few different reasons. When we wired up our battery, we wanted to power the glow plugs, which we did. However, we didn't account for powering the starter. It's possible that the battery doesn't have enough amperage for the starter and the plugs.
While the engine is spinning, the glow plugs aren't hot enough to actually ignite the Nitro, which results in the fuel spilling out of the exhaust. This creates its own problems - it's on fire, so that's a big issue. It's not super obvious when something is on fire, like right there you can see it.
Or maybe the engine isn't compressing the fuel enough. Maybe the glow plug shorted out. The scaled-down physics of a smaller engine make it way different than your average V8. We thought we were going to be done with this project two weeks ago. That's why it's having trouble pulling it, and now we're just adding way too much fuel.
Maybe that's definitely feeding the problem. That wasn't the issue. Come on, well well. But we can't get this thing running, and we're not going to give up. So I guess it's time to call in the nuclear option - part two of the sequel. You might remember Pacific Coast Hobbies from our previous video on RC cars. They happen to be experts on all things small and vehicular.
They were willing to help us out together, and we came up with a new plan. The plan is to use eight individual glow plug heaters to power the plugs. This means we'll only have to worry about powering the starter if we can do this in theory, we can finally fire this engine up.
They sent us their best glow plug expert, Theo, and together we're gonna try to troubleshoot it. The heaters are installed, and the fuel is flowing. All we have to do now is turn it on. It was different that time, let's try it again.
And no luck, but we're still not about to give up. We're still not sure what the issue is. It could be something obvious or something completely hidden. I think that we have an air leak on our carburetors and when you have an air leak, you can't tune the carburetor properly.
You can't get the air-fuel ratio to be correct, so it's not going to fire. Maybe we have a pinched o-ring or something like that that we can fix. Hopefully, it's not pinched. Or maybe we still haven't figured out the wiring.
It wants 11 point one volts, and what is the max amperage of this box? Ten. We're choking this one off quite a bit. So we tweaked the engine and started it up. Check the voltage, run the engine, add more fuel, add some starter fluid, run the engine again and again and again and again.
I mean, it's a model, first not an engine, but Nolan people have got it to start. I know it can be done. You're right. What are they doing that we aren't?
Well, guys, I think we've reached an impasse. I can continue working on this little engine and ignore pretty much everything else in my life like normal-sized cars, my loved ones, or other videos. Or I can do the mature thing and give up.
For now, we tried our best on this thing. We hired multiple experts. We even consulted people in other states. But it just didn't happen for now. But I swear that we will make another video. We will get this stupid little engine running.
And we will get this RC car driving. I'm gonna make Theo Spencer and Skyler at Pacific Coast Hobbies, and Matt at Work Perception so proud when we get this thing going. They're gonna be like, "Whoa, nice job Nolan. You didn't even get our cars running."
So make sure you don't miss that video. Subscribe to make sure you don't miss it. Thank you for joining me on this journey and thank you again to Pacific Coast Hobbies for all their help. Uh, you guys freaking rule.
Go buy something from them. Go pick up a wrench and work on something whether it's big or small. It doesn't really matter as long as you do it. You know, have fun with it.