Does anyone chassis ground?

[crazy nick]

I was wondering f it is possible to just ground everything to the chassis? Motor, esc, leds, servo, bec, receiver, the whole nine yards. Why or why not? I think it could make the wiring much cleaner. Positives and negatives?

[wings_of_fire]

Good question

[Charlie-III]

Decent question. Likely issues:

-Non-conductive chassis material, thus no ground
-Poor connections between chassis bits (assuming conductive) creating intermittents in the ground circuit, thus "glitching"
-Mixing high frequency (ESC mostly) and high amp grounds with "sensitive" grounds like the RX, more glitching
-Weight of hardware to make the grounds will likely be more than the wire you're removing

A scaler (or similar) with a steel full frame chassis would likely be the best option to try it out, but I, myself, would just stick to the current method.

Think of a tractor trailer "trailer" that has running lights that are dim or flickering, these are due to poor/bad grounds most of the time.

[crazy nick]

My idea is to run a strand of solid house wire from front to back. Solder it to the chassis. Then run the grounds from each component to the solid wire and solder. Just a thought.

[crazy nick]

My thing is , I just hate a ton of wires from front to back all over the dag nabbit place!

[redsawacs]

If you want to break out the positive and/or negative from the connectors, I suppose it would work. Why? I dont know.

[M1tch]

I guess it would work like that, but any break in the joints would stop something from working. Most of my components, except for steering servo and winch are close together so there would be no point it doing what you suggest.. Basically I just ground everything back to the receiver. Example would be to run a ground wire from bec, servo, and winch as they are close to each other into a soldered joint like a y lead , then a single wire to the RX. Doing that helps cut out any glitching.

[Charlie-III]

Originally Posted by crazy nick

My idea is to run a strand of solid house wire from front to back. Solder it to the chassis. Then run the grounds from each component to the solid wire and solder. Just a thought.

That would fix most of my earlier comments. It also adds issues, like, when a part dies you can't "just unplug it & swap", you would need to unsolder it and then solder in a new part.

Granted, I solder in my motors while others have plugs (makes swaps faster/easier, especially in the field) but I rarely have motor issues.
I do however have a "non solder" way to connect my external BEC output direct to my servo so I can do quick swaps as well as program easily and not have to worry about over-volting my RX traces with my typical servo voltages.

[YJ_Driver]

Don't use this method for the motor unless you plan on going forward only

As for the others, you still need the positive wire and signals wires, so how much wiring do you really save?

[JohnRobHolmes]

Originally Posted by crazy nick

My idea is to run a strand of solid house wire from front to back. Solder it to the chassis. Then run the grounds from each component to the solid wire and solder. Just a thought.

This would work fine. You could chassis ground for small stuff like lights, but anything high power or emf sensitive would not be good running through the chassis. No servo, ESC, or rx chassis grounds.


I'm running solid buss bars on a few builds. It does clean up wiring when components are far away from each other.

[JesterSpec]

Sounds like a solution to a non existent problem, Just hide the wiring if you don't like it.