Welcome!
Crain Engineering designs and develops Onboard Glow Plug Drivers for RC model enthusiasts.
What is a Glow Plug Driver?
A Glow Plug Driver is essentially an electronic servo that allows you to turn your glow plug on and off from your transmitter. The power for the Glow plug comes from an on board battery. The Glow Driver plugs into your receiver either from a Y-Connector split off of your throttle channel or you can use an unused channel on your receiver. By programming mixes and switches on your transmitter you can make your glow plug a smart feature of your model.
Crain Engineering Glow Plug Drivers are very compact and weigh less than an ounce!
Why use a Glow Driver?
- Avoid “Flame outs” at slow idle speeds. Nobody likes the engine to die on on landings!
- When your engine is mounted in ‘Cylinder down’ configurations, the fuel can pool inside the Cylinder and cause poor idle or even flameouts.
- It’s Smart. The Glow Driver can be set to turn on only at low throttle settings. Then it turns off at high throttle when its not needed. The on/off setpoint is set by you.
- The smart on/off feature means you can use a very small LiPo or LiFe battery to power your Glow Plug which minimizes the size and weight of the onboard battery used to power the Glow Plug.
- A Glow Driver is especially useful in situations where access to the glow plug is obstructed by cowlings or the engine is mounted with the cylinder in the sideways or down positions.
- A glow driver eliminates the need to connect an external glow battery or glow power supply.
- A glow driver can give smoother operation at slow idle speeds.
- It will allow you to maintain a very low idle speed since the glow plug will be on at the idle speed.
Watch the Video
Tom K. is a customer who graciously created this video showing the installation and use of the Single Glow Plug Driver used in his planes. One plane is a typical setup with a single cylinder engine. The other plane is a twin cylinder engine using the Glow Driver to drive two Glow plugs. He also describes how to make a home made connector to the Glow Plug using a wheel collar.