Stuart Paintball
Some of the conversions to the Stuart had been carried out before I acquired the tank, I have done the speed controller, re-wired suitable for 18v operation, motor upgrades and allot of repairs to the suspension.
Below are a montage of pictures with some commentaries.
Turret
The lever on the left of the barrel is the CO2 cartridge release, I have to remove the whole top of the turret to get to this lever.
Trigger servo on the right and gun elevation servo on the left.
Paintball ammo goes down the black tube.
Here are the two replacement motors which are direct replacements.
The speed controller is on the left, a Sabertooth 2x10 R/C
On the right is a DC-DC step down voltage converter, set to reduce the battery voltage to 12v to power the tanks original onboard systems.
As you can see the motor wires are not connected to the old controller board, which is being supplied from the voltage reduction module and then at the bottom of the picture the small connector supplies the old receiver board.
Overview
Main radio control items, 40Mhz receiver on right, converter module in center and original receiver/sound board on left.
Smoke unit.
Smoke unit controls, on/off switch and variable resistor to control the fan speed.
The old A/B frequency switch on the back of the tank has been used to switch the front & rear LEDs on/off.
Drive sprocket repair - these often split and to make them stronger clamp a hose clip around the shaft and then tighten it up, this picture shows the clip just before tightening (you can see it's a little bit loose on the right hand side).
The motors have been upgraded to RS 550S's
I am now using RS 555 PB motors for future upgrades, they have a ballrace on the main shaft and give an RPM increase from 70 to 121 on the gearbox output shaft under no load at 11v, an increase of 173%
The pinion gears have to be levered off the splined shafts of the original motors, then drilled & tapped to take a grub screw before fitting on new motors.
I looked at this site before deciding which motors to install www.customrcmodels.com a .pdf version of this page incase it gets taken down .pdf-motor-selection
Speed controller = Sabertooth 2X10 R/C is our dual motor driver specifically optimized for use in radio controlled vehicles.
It is suitable for medium powered robots, cars and boats.
Out of the box, it can supply two DC brushed motors with up to 10A each.
Peak currents of 15A are achievable for a few seconds.
Overcurrent and thermal protection means you'll never have to worry about killing the driver with accidental stalls or by hooking up too big a motor.
This special R/C edition of our motor driver comes with an invert channel and options for exponential control, autocalibration and built-in mixing. The operating mode is set with the onboard DIP switches so there are no jumpers to lose.
Sabertooth is the first synchronous regenerative motor driver in its class. The regenerative topology means that your batteries get recharged whenever you command your robot to slow down or reverse. Sabertooth also allows you to make very fast stops and reverses - giving your vehicle a quick and nimble edge.
Sabertooth has a built in 5V BEC that can provide power to a microcontroller or R/C receiver.
The lithium cutoff mode allows Sabertooth to operate safely with lithium ion and lithium polymer battery packs - the highest energy density batteries available.
Sabertooth's transistors are switched at ultrasonic speeds (32kHz) for silent operation.
If you need more advanced control features, check out Sabertooth 2X12.
For something smaller, check out Sabertooth 2X5 R/C.
Product Specs Model: Sabertooth 2X10 R/C
Specifications:
Up to 18V in: 10A continuous, 15A peak per channel
24V in: 8A continuous, 10A continuous with additional heatsinking/airflow, 15A peak per channel
Synchronous regenerative drive
Ultra-sonic switching frequency
Thermal and overcurrent protection
Lithium protection mode
Applications:
Combat robots up to 30lb
Differential drive robots
Radio controlled tanks, cars and boats
