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Rotostart Battery?

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NJRC

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Do you think I could burn up my handheld rotostarter by hooking it up to a car battery for power source?
I actually did it using a connector, battery clips and some 12 guage wire. It works great as I could use it as a pit table spare to start up my car or truck but was wondering if it will burn up my rotorstart since it is actually a 12 volt car battery? It's not like I would hold the start button on forever to see if it would burn out, just a quick bump to get the engine going.
 
if it does fry I'm sure you could replace the motor. i use a 9.6 in my roto starter but i dont fully charger them. i figure by the time the motor fries in the roto start i will already have thrown a .18 with a pull start into it
 
Roto start generaly uses a 7.2 volt battery.
A car battery is 12 volt, but actually charges up to 14.4 (i think).
I would think that some frying may be in your future.
It might work, but I wouldn't suggest it.
 
well it's actually my spare rotostarter. One came with savage 25 and the other from my RS4 3 Evo so since it's only short burst to get my engines started, I will give it a shot til the thing fries. Then when it's time to actually replace my engines, there is a pullstart.
Technically there are a bunch of things in a real car that power off of less than 12 volts and they last ok so I may be safe or maybe not.
 
I'd just get a spare battery just in case. Better to do that rather than risk cutting short your day due to desperate measures for one last run.
 
go down to radio shack and grab a current limiter or something of the sort. if you tell them the application they should be able to help. but if theyre clueless just grab a dc reostat and use a multimeter to dial in your volts
 
good luck at radio shack last time i went there asking the guy for an LED light not even the manager knew what i was talkin about they had to go into their computers to know what i was talking about.
 
Good advice Werks.

Hmmm, I thought we had a six figure IBEW electrician that haunted these boards.

Mr T
 
Mr T-Maxx said:
Good advice Werks.

Hmmm, I thought we had a six figure IBEW electrician that haunted these boards.

Mr T


Everyone wants to be a comedian!! thats funny

I work with AC, not DC
And electronics is not the same.
Thats a different school all together.
 
HAAAAAAA!!!!


Just about everything in an automobile is designed to run on a 12 VOLT circuit. Diff items may require less Amperage (light bulbs, cig lighter, radio) but they all run on 12 Volts. I would not recommend running your rotostart off a car batt. If you run it for anything more then just a few short seconds you will deifinitly fry the motor.

Get yourself a decent 3000MAH stick pack and you wont have any troubles using it all day on a full charge.

In a DC world, most electronics respond very poorly to too much / too little voltage. Too much and they fry, too little and they dont work very well. Think of Voltage as the amount of pressure comming through a pipe or a hose. Now imagine hooking up a lawn sprinkler to a firehose. The water pressure would destroy the lawn sprinkler.
 
The fire hose and lawn sprinkler is a good way to look at it. But a quick jolt of 12 volts is not that much, direct current from a home outlet would be worse. You may be true to the theory of just about everything in an automobile designed to run on a 12v circuit but in an automobile, an ECM can run off of 9v and still retain memory, an flashing LED off an alarm can run off of 9v or less along with some other things.
I have been bump starting the engine for the past 2 days with no problems so far. If it fries later on down the road, it's no big deal to me as it's a spare starter and pullstart engines and starter box are my next purchases when it's time to swap out engines.
 
well I didn't fry the motor, I just broke off some gear teeth.
Oh well, it was a spare roto-start to begin with and I still have a working one. But I am getting tired of carrying the roto-start around so I am switching over to pull starts.
 
NJRC said:
But I am getting tired of carrying the roto-start around so I am switching over to pull starts.

That's the best thing I've heard all day.

I had the same issue with the traxxas "EZ" start. I hated carrying it. Whats the point? More crap on the truck and more crap in my pocket. I guess it really didn't matter, I only had the 2.5 in the maxx for about 3 weeks, then I gave up on it.

More crap to charge and more crap to cut your day short.

I'm partial to pull-starts, can you tell?
 
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