I have used quarks in crawlers a good bit. The low speed control is a bit better on low voltage, but they have an annoying habit of going in reverse when the tire is bound. I use them mostly in scale rigs that don't see hard crawling or comp use.

Have you gotten everything smoothed out dabid?

great avatar, mr. holmes. :lol: :oh:

does the MM have the same annoying habit as the quark? i'll find out soon enough as i just got the 'new' updated MM today in the mail. i have a variety of a123 packs to see what works best - 2s2p, 3s2p, 4s2p...and that's as high as i want to take it, although i can also go 5s, 6s and 7s.

i'm also eagerly awaiting my custom CC BEC that i ordered from you. :yipi:

Although the mamba 25 has reversed on me a few times, I have never had a mamba max go into reverse when I told it to go forwards.

What is new about the mamba max you are getting? New firmware?

this is the info i got a while ago from BPP:

We were originally informed by Castle Creations that shipments of the MambaMax Combos and Controllers would be taking place this week to Vendors. Unfortunately Castle Creations is still behind in their production of the MambaMax controllers and they have informed us that they will not meet the production goal of shipping this week, delaying all shipments to all vendors & customers. The reason for this delay was with the new production of the actual circuit board itself for the MambaMax controller (Castle Creations builds all the controllers in-house at their own production facilities in Kansas) . We have learned that this new production of the MambaMax has several updates incorporated into it along with the latest software rev. loaded so while the wait for the latest version of these controllers is painful, it will be worthwhile to have the most up to date version.

I have a brand new one in hand, firmware is 1.09 like all the rest.

i just checked my 'new' one, and it's the same too. castle link software (loaded from the cd) is 3.0, and firmware options are 1.09 and 1.07.

castle doesn't have anything on their website about anything new with the MM either. maybe joe will pipe in on the castle support portion here.

It sounds to me like they just rearranged some components on the circuit board. In that quote from BPP it says nothing about firmware or software alterations...

Sorry it took me a while to get back to everyone, I haven't been able to test the truck either. Last Saturday during the big outing, I rolled the truck and it slid upside down for a ways ripping off the antenna wire at about 2" or so. It worked good enough out there in the hills, but glitched like crazy back home. I finally swapped it out, but another of my A123's has bit the dust, so I'll rebuild the remaining loose cells into a single 4s pack......should have stump pulling torque then, just have to work out the mounting.

Well, I tweaked the ESC the way I was told and bumped voltage to 4s, and it worked great! I ran the entire pack down on Saturday without issue, no jerky starts or rolling backwards out of control, no heat issues either. However, I decided to move some rocks around in our backyard for a better course and somehow sent the ESC into a coma. Even with CC's help over the phone, there was nothing to do but send it in. I'm not sure what went wrong, but if worst comes to worst, I'll have to pay $50 to get a new one.

I'm not sure if I nuked the motor too, it seemed quite hot and let off a whisp of smoke, I s'pose I could hook up a Mamba 25 I'm not using and try it out.

Were you running the mamba's internal BEC?

i'm curious if you ran the internal MM BEC as well.

i'm planning to put my Stealth through it's maiden voyage tomorrow and was planning to run 4s a123's through the MM internal BEC. if that's what blew yours, i'll use my CC BEC. (maybe i'll just run my CC BEC anyhow...)

I was using the CC Bec, set to only 6.2v too.........no idea what went wrong, but it's in Castle's hands now.

Crap, rigged up my Mamba 25 this afternoon and it did the same non-arming thing, it was the motor that kept it from going through. I took the old nuked one back to the store and returned it for a brand new one but still the same KMS 2814/08, I think I'll just run 3s for now with the Mamba 25 until I get the Mamba Max back......hopefully they'll tell me it's still fine too.