Schulze is out of business!

[David Kingston]

Maybe SCHULZE might be still in business if there speed controls were prone to failure. Like other known ESC's.
I've never been able to destroy a schulze from use and abuse.

It's a shame that the are closing their doors.

Dave

[ray schrauwen]

Watch this and this is possibly why it is not going to happen also..

At this point, there is a strong lack of innovation in China, only copying of other country's designs.
My opinion on the "what if" in regards to Schulze's design being made by an Asian based company, is that it doesn't really matter. It's usually the poor execution that leads to the inconsistancy and failure of Asian ESCs, not the design. This is much like the idea of HPR's hulls being produced elsewhere...the product is only as good as the person who makes it.

Also, it is becoming an increasingly common practice to have a China based company make a product or design without knowing what it's for or what it does. By doing this, you prevent the manufacturer from selling to your customers directly...you also have someone making your product that doesn't know why they are doing what they are doing, which will never equate to a consistant high quality end part.

[KartRacer]

As Tyler points out, in general, the higher priced products generally offer deeper warantee support and this is no accident or artifact. Having a background in both manufacturing and retail, I have learned that a product's cost of manufacture generally includes an amount , usually as a percentage of raw cost, that goes into a warantee equity account to pay for the producer's handling of defective returns. This amount is built into the product's wholesale price if the actual manufacturer honors the warantee, or as likely in, for example Turnigy ESC's, HK gets the product minus thev OEM warantee and tacks on a warantee equity fund amount to pay for handling of returns themselves. Since HK sells at (what I'm assuming are) slim margins I tend to believe that the amount of warantee holdback amount is a rather small amount which in turn causes a fair amount of warantee "stonewalling" to the consumer. In any case, it's you, the consumer that ALWAYS pays for this as it is built into the price you pay. One way to evidence this is how retailers of car batteries price their battery lineup. You can buy batteries with 60 month warantees, 72 month warantees, 84 month warantees and so forth. The price goes up as the length of warantees go up. IT"S the SAME BATTERY - you the consumer are just paying, as I explained above, for the warantee holdback that the retailer must maintain. Same for "Free service for 24 months on your new BMW". Seriously I hope no one believes that this is "free" and doesn't realize the price of this service is built into the car's selling price and the buyer is just paying for it up front when they buy the car. Adds credence to the slogan : "You get what you pay for" and like my buddy Redneck Andy says : "There 'aint no free lunches"

Well said!

[properchopper]

If we can put a man on the moon, we can build a 100% bulletproof ESC. The reason this hasn't been done by most firms is the "elephant in the room" that's been tangentially alluded to in this discussion.Before any product launch, a success-driven enterprise must do market research to determine what it's projected sales volume potential is. For a company to remain solvent it must recoup it's cost of manufacture by realizing a specific sales volume. I don't doubt Shultze's management has come to the realization that the entire market for high-end ESC's is smaller than can support their operation. Very possible this holds true for Castle Creations, who if deemed viable, could expand their lineup of marine ESC's. Low and mid-end marine esc's are another market demographic entirely, and provide the bread-and-butter income with sufficient volume to sustain their survival and hopefully growth. The successful market penetration of low-end ESC's is no doubt driven by a reasonably low purchase price, which can unfortunately for us be achieved using often marginal parts and assembly techniques like Tyler mentioned. Witness the rash of FCR esc's that, while fairly decent had a high failure rate due to a poor grade of solder which liquified, ran over and shorted the boards.

[Ken Haines]

Hey Guys,
Just put a "Thank You Matthias Schulze" thread up on the Rum Runner Forum.
I was thinking it should be on just one forum to keep it easy for Joerg to give
to Matthais when it is complete. Guess we could put it on both. Let's see how it goes.
Hopefully all of you will participate.
Thanks, Ken

[ManuelW]

I see the whole situation of Schulze with mixed feelings. On one side I would definitely regret when Schulze finally closes. They set some important milestones in ESC and charging equipment so far and their parts were still selling pretty good. Therefore I would prefer when they would open again or may be bought by another investor. In addition I do also have some 40.160's here which would need an upgrade/service.

On the other side I definitely see NOT china or chinese products as a reason for their closing, its in my eyes probably more a failure of their development and management. Seems as I'm pretty alone with that opinion but here a few examples or questions:
-why are even 15 year old (!) and used old Schulze 40.160 ESC's still sold for a higher sum than what the fully new developed successor 40.161 would cost brand new from the company with warranty?
-why did Schulze spent so much time and money developing their completely own 2.4Ghz system? Basically without testing it, I assumed it works great and is technically good? But who knows that Schulze has their full 2.4Ghz System, or even runs it? The only single guy (and I would be confident I know quite some people in our hobby)... I know who drives that system is Ralf from germany. And an interesting thing, he replied in the german board on a similar post of mine as I mentioned his name and the reply was roughly: "Well as you mentioned me and the Schulze 2.4Ghz system, I had to reply and to sum up all my experience with their 2.4Ghz system its just one word: frustration"??
-why does the Schulze's top-charger have two independent charging outputs for 14S each, which is still absolutely unique at the market (I would not even know a 2x 12S duo charger), but it only has the option to balance a single 14S battery at a time?? Wouldnt it be more interesting to add the option to balance both batterys at the same time??
-why has their new future 24.150 probably the worst cooling layout I've ever seen on a Navy ESC in our hobby?
-why does in many setups a T180 ESC works properly for 1/5th the price of a Schulze 24.150, where that Schulze ESC is known to fail?

So questions over questions

I do really hope that Schulze gets back in business and can continue with their successes from the past - maybe they have to think about a newalignment of their product range. Alone for their service it would be sad, which I was happy about and did their work very well.

regards,
Manuel

[RaceMechaniX]

Manuel,

I go agree with you on several points particularily on the 2.4GHz. Perhaps if Schulze could limit their business to ESC's which they know very well the doors could remain open. I suspect esc's are not enough to justify the costs of running the business though. Although their older 40.160wk's were great, they were fallling behind on technology. No data logging, battery input, PC programmability, etc. I am sure the new RoHS requirements also hurt everyone by limiting material use. The mutli-layer power boards with heavy copper traces are incredibly expensive and the switch to lighter copper boards was in my opinion one of the few reasons why the older design works so well. The heavy copper boards were able to pull heat out from the center phase of FETS much better than the current ones. I would love to see the older style controllers with power board and seperate control board using the high copper content with cooling both on the board through brass tubes and with chill plates on both sides of the FETS like the FCR's.

TG

[jaike5]

Has anyone tryed YGE esc's ? seem to be used as a sch. replacement across the pond. High end and a little cheaper than sch.

[RaceMechaniX]

Yes, actually very similar to Schulzes. However to my knowledge YGE is no longer making the 200A version which was popular unless by special request. I have tried modifying a YGE 320HV for marine use with limitied success. The programming is by far the weakest link with the YGE's. I have heard the standard 155 Navy's and 160 HV's work well once programmed correctly.

Tyler

[ray schrauwen]

YGE must be reeling that HiModel & HKing sell rip-offs.

[ManuelW]

Hi Tyler,

well I would say also their charging equipment was pretty awesome. Had a few of their older style 636 and 636+ chargers. The oldest one I owned was built in 1992 so the time I had it it was more than 15 years old and basically with the latest update even fully Lipo-capable, was just missing the balancer. And it still was able to charge 12S with rated 275W charging power. I mean 275W charging power in 1992, I wouldnt even know what battery technology was that time, was just 5 years old and cared about other stuff. But basically I'd guess something around 1200mAh NiCd cells? So this charger was WAY ahead its time and even till a very few years back 275W charging power was pretty impressive!! Before the lipo technology was common I think they had the best charging equipment you could simply by for money out there.

For the ESC's I fully agree your post, although I find the old Schulze pretty neat also from its "non-existing" features. If you know what you do its a simple plug-and-play unit, I mean you dont even need to program it to any transmitter. But basically now everybody ask for things like datalogging, PC programmability or individual cell cut-off protection. Big question is if that makes it better and if people actually know what they are doing? An interesting quote in that field may be "we live in a world of smart phones and dumb people". I mean you have the big YGE yourself, the amount of options with the ProgCard II is immense. But guess after talking with Heino Jung himself, how many people simply programm something and then complain it was the ESC's fault? Who really takes time to try to understand the principles of timing or PWM? Same here on OSE, where I see people simply recommend a certain timing especially suitable for any "Y"-Wind or "D"-Wind motor?? The single-layer monoblock PCB from the old Schulze 40.160 was absolutely awesome when it comes to cooling and distributing heat away from the ESC, its Fairchild Semiconductor FETs itself were far away from up-to-date with an 80A and 4.5mOhm rating compared to the latest generation of IRF D²-PAK fets with a 260A and 2.1mOhm rating which show what is possible at the moment.

So I have the impression their old product range was simply amazing, as their 40Mhz receivers were, but with their new product range they couldnt continue the high level of their successfull predecessors?

regards,
Manuel

[RaceMechaniX]

I must admit that that extra programming functions on the newer Schulzes added headaches at times and these always seemed to work flawlessly when you left the settings in Auto mode. I rarely see people use the battery balancing connection, but the data logging is a very useful function. For the few us who do use the data logging function it is worth it.

I never had any experience with the Schulze chargers, in fact I have never seen one in the US although I have only been in FE for the last 6 years. They do look awfully fancy but at $500 US compared to $250 US for a Hyperion 720 Duo which is a great product it is a little hard to swallow.

The YGE's program card is headache, but if I can get the 320HV to work with boats it might be good.

It sounds very tempting to jump into the niche market providing very high end ESC's, but it's so hard to control the end user that most will just pull their hair out. With the advancements in DIY BLDC kits I think it is possible in the future to design very high power driver stages with commercial off the shelf processing and controls piggybacked. I know for one I am looking into this.

Tyler

[Ralf]

Hi,

Schulze stands for technology and quality. They got reputation by their ISL-Series, Receivers and the 40.160, the 32.170 was the first ESC who worked in the brushless world and opened the door to crazy power.

But time is ticking. I made experiences with the 2,4Ghz-System (yeah, everybody drives Fasst or Corono, i am idiot putting money in that system because i trusted the technic know how of schulze and i love my Graupner R1), i was the only guy who has to went to his boat to get it back in range on SAWs....
The chargers are able doing 14S, that makes them exclusive. But there are more innovative Chargers with more power like the Pulsars. Up to 10S we are able to pumping 1kw+ since two years with ichargers.
Yes, the old 40.160 are lacking of antispark, telemetry, lipowatch etc., but this makes them much more bullet proof. I killed to XXL and i know their limits, they are really good ESCs within their Specification (334/444 @5Ah). But this is not a big step in relation to a 40.160 (which was underrated, the XXl is correctly rated)

I am a technic guy, if i see cool technic i am willed to pay. But if i pay a lot of money i expect something worth the money. And the 40.160 were the last Parts which satisfied me. It is frustrating seeing that XXL and knowing how much power could be possible with that money and size if they solved some things in the core design a little bit better and more robust.

Since my last 40.160 and the 2,4ghz were stolen i sold the left parts made of Schulze last year and even if i am not convinced of the products anymore it is sad seeing them in that situation. I definitely hope they find a solution. Less ESC-manufacturer makes the world not better or more interesting.

Ralf

edit: Like it was stated: Schulze was never a cheap ESC to start with the hobby, it was top end. On the other hand you have to supply the main stream because then you make money. And with the new series it was even in the mainstream-sector critical.

[ray schrauwen]

There is a 2KW charger on the market now but, only 10S capable

[Ralf]

Asyn even 2,8kw....and this charger is very good, even if i liked the programs and programability of the 3010b more
But when Schulze claimed 800W the 3010B were already pumping on every table.