Lipo Conversions Part 1

If you're into RC at all you're mostly likely know what LiPo batteries are. If you're not have a look here

Having a whole load of these batteries in my garage I've discovered that you can do a whole lot more with them than power RC aircraft. 

So my first LiPo conversion project was to resurrect my trusty battery drill. Its a great drill however it suffers from the same problem that a lot of battery drills do in that if you don't use it all the time the batteries die eventually and also the batteries take a very long time to charge. So I converted mine to run on Lipos and now it not only charges much faster, but I can buy very cheap replacement batteries for it when ever I need to and charge it with my Lipo charger instead of the big bulky charger it came with. 

So here's how to do it. 

Step 1 - Battery Selection.

You'll need to open up the battery that comes out of the handle of your drill and have a look (or measure with a multimeter) at much much voltage the battery supplies. Then you can buy a lipo to match. In my case this was a four cell 1.3 amp hours battery by Turnigy. Its also Important to take into account what the maximum discharge rate that battery will be subjected to is and make sure you get a battery that can handle that. I'm not exactly sure what that is for my drill so i got this 45-90 C discharge batter from HobbyKing for $13.50. The final thing to consider is a battery that will fit in your drill's battery casing. Don't get one too big or it won't fit and you'll be up a certain creek. 

Step 2 - Solder up the connectors 

Once you've got your battery ready to go you'll need to solder the connectors from the battery casing to a plug that will match what ever kind of battery plug you use. I use deans so that what I've connected here. You can work out which is the positive and which is the negative terminal by looking at the old battery you've taken out and seeing how it was connected. 

 

Step 3 - Insert Battery
Once you've got your connectors soldered up you can put your battery in side, plug it in and put the whole thing back in the drill. One mod you could do which I didn't, was to solder another battery connectors outside your battery casing so you can charge it with out taking it out of its case. I simply unscrew the case and take the battery out when I want to charge it. I've actually got two so I just swap the battery over and put a new one in while I charge the flat one.

 

Japan

I just arrived home from a two week trip to Japan for the purposes of site seeing and snow sports. Over the next few months there will be photos appearing on Flickr of my travels. However in the mean time I thought I'd make a little post about my thoughts of Japan and recommendations about where to go and what to see when you are there.

Firstly it would seem that all those website who say its a good idea to book ahead when you visit Japan are in fact correct. We didn't. Well we already had our first week of accommodation booked in Niseko where we went skiing however we didn't book much else and we kind of had to take what we could find, which wasn't always easy. That being said, if you are going to wing it as we did, there are a lot of things that will help you, like some great websites such as Booking.com, WiFi everywhere you can imagine and a very awesome Japanese Rail network that will get you everywhere, quickly.

One word about booking.com. While its true they won't charge you to use their website they will charge the hotel you are booking with and in the case of the smaller ones, they'll probably jack the price up to match. So if you can speak Japanese or get lucky enough to phone a place that speaks English, simply get the number of booking.com and phone then for you reservation instead of using the website, you might save a few hundred Yen.

Japan rail is an amazing organisation and moves a truly impressive amount of people around every day with out incident. They are also the most punctual institution I've ever dealt with. So if you are traveling to Japan and are going to be using them, and I'd recommend it, then you should probably get your self a JR Rail Pass.

Of the many reasons to use JR, one of my favorites is the opportunity to ride on the mighty Shinkansen or bullet trains. It is truly incredible how fast, smooth and reliable these trains are. If you do want to go on the fastest one of all, you'll need to travel express from Utsunomiya to Morioka (or the other way) on the Hyabusa Shinkansen which will get up to 320 km/h.

Japan is a beautiful and diverse place. In our travels, my friends and I went from Niseko to Sapporo to Hakodate up in Hokkiado (north island) and on down though Honshu (middle island) stopping at Nikko, Nagoya, Kyoto, Mishima and Tokyo. My picks of the places we went would have to be Kyoto for its shrines and temples, Nagoya for its winter lights festival and Niseko for its beautiful scenery and amazing food.