The chill in the air can only mean one thing here in Ohio, the end of Summer.  With the end of Summer the temperatures start to drop and the air starts to dry up.  With the dry air comes static charge.  You start noticing every time you get out of your car you end up getting zapped, when you go to shake someone’s hand you get another zap, even hobbies can become susceptible to static.  This is exactly what happened to me two nights ago.

My nephew has a remote control car that he absolutely loves to drive fast and crash with.  Well the remote control cars of today tend to have a little more power than those that I used to play with.  So all the crashing and stopping and going had stripped the spur gear out that is driven by the dual motors.  You can see the remains of the gear below.

While shopping for parts to fix his car I decided he needs a friend to run the R/C cars with so I got myself one.  (Of course it had to be faster than his.  I mean who wants to lose a race to a kid.)  I was done with his car and took the car I purchased out of the box.  This truck came pre-assembled unlike the ones I used to get and all I had to do was add some accent decals if I wanted to.  Of course I decided I could make it look like the one on the box without any problems.  This is where the problem started.   

You see, the body of the truck is plastic and after wiping it down to ensure it was clean for the decals I had loaded it up with a nice static charge.  Then by peeling the decals off the backing paper I generated some more static onto the decals.  This resulted in me getting the decal within an inch of the body and the static charge would pull the decal onto the surface before it was lined up.  After peeling the same decal off about 3 times because of this I really began to wish I had an Ion Air Gun or even a small Ion Bar in my garage to help with the problem.  

With a quick blast of ionized air over the body inside and out, eliminates all the static and makes the decal application process much easier.   Now I just have to work on that whole steady hand part of it.  Eventually it will be done and look near professional.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF