Well .. The plan was to wrap up and do loads of flying over the winter period … But .. So many London trips with work meant that weekends were always squeezed and then ….
When I got up to pull the Sherwood out and get her all ready the battery appeared to have died ! What a pain … Charged it that evening and tried again the next day only to see it go flat almost immediately and not manage to turn the prop over more than a few painfully slow turns
My good mate Mike (Fleming) kindly bought me a mini trickle charg – the sort that can be left plugged in. Did this but then found same turn problems …
Suspected I had a dead cell so cut back open again and removed the battery … Then tried to sort it whilst I had full access to everything at the rear
Graham (from CIAS) kindly loaned me the jump trolley so that I could discount the battery or point to the cabling.
The jump didn’t work … Later found out to be a faulty live jump cable I had !
Mike and I then set about running nose to tail checks with Mikes superb incredibly powerful ‘jump pack’ NOCO GB40 Genuis Boost .. WHAT a piece of kit .. Weighs nothing but could launch a moon rocket !
Mike connected at the sharp end and proved that a direct connect at the front solenoid would spin the prop faster than it had ever spun, so we went further rearwards to the second solenoid … This proved quite tricky to reach but again spun really well.
This moved us to the cable between the cockpit and the tail.
We moved to the rear and sure we were getting intermittent good and bad turning. Mike started to break down each element and we certainly felt that the isolator switch might be causing a problem.
In any event we felt that the rear mounted battery and its 4-5m of power cable running to the front wasn’t probably a great way of getting a fat bit of power to the engine from a relatively small puny motorbike battery way back in the tail.
We tried connecting the GB40 booster in series to the existing battery and pow .. Loads of turn power …
Next plan .. Decide the best way to resolve low battery force and get airborne again
Jersey Sherwood Ranger 
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