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There are now profiles for slicing with Cura if you don't have a copy of simplify3D.
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And now Factory files and G-Codes for printing all parts in PLA are posted as well. If your printer is tuned well, and you have at least a 200x200x170 you can try and print this with very minimal fiddling.
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Quoted:
Trying to resist the urge to glue these together.... https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/102216/38840259_224050824959159_1816346604395823104_n-636164.JPG https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/102216/38846472_248251665814977_8587131915385962496_n-636166.JPG View Quote |
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Quoted:
Why? View Quote Of course now that I've tested the material and found it to be more than strong enough it could be a ton of fun. With the right power setup 150mph might be possible. Would take two people to launch and the possum would have to be sober. |
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Not sure how I missed this thread.
Gonna start converting the spare bedroom/office to the RC room. May wind up with one side getting an RC printer bench while the other side is drone/fpv/pc/editing related. Your creations interest me for when it is time to return to fixed wing fpv |
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Quoted:
Not sure how I missed this thread. Gonna start converting the spare bedroom/office to the RC room. May wind up with one side getting an RC printer bench while the other side is drone/fpv/pc/editing related. Your creations interest me for when it is time to return to fixed wing fpv View Quote I'm also currently getting a fpv camera installed into a pike. Should be a lot of fun for going through race rates. |
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will you have to modify the plane much to get a FPV camera in it?
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Hey OP, I've been thinking about printing a plane as well but I'm curious about how you came up with your design?
Did you just wing it or are you an engineer? Not sure what to factor in for weight vs power vs wing span and etc for it to fly decently. |
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View Quote Partly just for strength, but also because the place I use for prints has a per-piece setup fee. |
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Threads like this, are a big part of the reason why I'm sitting here waiting for FedEx to deliver my ANET A8 kit.
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Quoted:
will you have to modify the plane much to get a FPV camera in it? View Quote Quoted:
Hey OP, I've been thinking about printing a plane as well but I'm curious about how you came up with your design? Did you just wing it or are you an engineer? Not sure what to factor in for weight vs power vs wing span and etc for it to fly decently. View Quote What kind of a design are you thinking of, and what do you want it to do? Quoted:
Is it possible to print the fuselage as one long tube instead of five (or more) sections that have to be glued together? Partly just for strength, but also because the place I use for prints has a per-piece setup fee. View Quote |
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Neat! Have any pictures or video of it getting printed throughout the process?
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Quoted:
Neat! Have any pictures or video of it getting printed throughout the process? View Quote Here's a pic of some vertical stabilizers and wingtips being printed. The machine squirts out a 0.25mm high layer of plastic at a time and builds the parts from the bottom up. Attached File Here's a quick video of some autogyro gearbox parts being printed on the same machine. Different airframe of course, but the exact same concept. 3D Printed Autogyro Gearbox |
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Quoted:
I'm a farmer, not an engineer, but most of the math isn't that complex. I have designed and built a ton of my own airplane designs out of conventional materials. So wing loading, power, drag, control authority, axis stability, cg calculations and general flight performance characteristics are now second nature to predict and account for. What kind of a design are you thinking of, and what do you want it to do? View Quote I don't know what they call it (maybe flying wing?) but I was thinking B2 bomber style. As for what I want it to do? That's less important, I really just enjoy building things but basically I'd like having a FPV camera on it just for fun or maybe a belly camera on it to map out some property or something. |
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Quoted: I'm no engineer either, but I'm also not super into RC planes so I've never really done the math on anything. I'm sure if I look into it more I could figure out the math as well. TBH I wasn't even sure where to start but I think you already gave me a few suggestions on that. I don't know what they call it (maybe flying wing?) but I was thinking B2 bomber style. As for what I want it to do? That's less important, I really just enjoy building things but basically I'd like having a FPV camera on it just for fun or maybe a belly camera on it to map out some property or something. View Quote The Zagi is one of the older foam designs of flying wing, and there's a long list of similar designs. There's a fairly simple formula for calculating where the CG (balance point) of a flying wing should be, but I think the sheet I have with that formula is still packed away from the move (haven't got my shop set up, yet). |
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Quoted:
Because the power on tap would be enormous and I hadn't yet tested the new material. Normal foam rc airplane crashes aren't that big a deal, but a chunk of plastic and metal doing 120+ mph might be. :D Of course now that I've tested the material and found it to be more than strong enough it could be a ton of fun. With the right power setup 150mph might be possible. Would take two people to launch and the possum would have to be sober. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
Quoted:
Why? Of course now that I've tested the material and found it to be more than strong enough it could be a ton of fun. With the right power setup 150mph might be possible. Would take two people to launch and the possum would have to be sober. Just don't hit anyone in the head with it. |
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Quoted:
I don't know what they call it (maybe flying wing?) but I was thinking B2 bomber style. As for what I want it to do? That's less important, I really just enjoy building things but basically I'd like having a FPV camera on it just for fun or maybe a belly camera on it to map out some property or something. View Quote Either you need some drag rudder tricks, or a bit of gyro control. Or just cheat, and make your own version that has stabilizers. You don't have to worry about radar profiles after all lol. Quoted:
What does that model actually weigh in at? View Quote |
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Quoted:
B2 bomber would be pretty cool. It's a very complex aerodynamic design however. You'll need to do a good bit of research if you want it to fly with stability without vertical stabilizers. Either you need some drag rudder tricks, or a bit of gyro control. Or just cheat, and make your own version that has stabilizers. You don't have to worry about radar profiles after all lol. View Quote I used to build and fly a lot of variations of the ZagNutz, and flew combat with the guys at work, during lunch. We didn't use streamers, since one of the guys tried flying with a streamer (before brushless motors got affordable) and the motor could barely keep the plane in the air with the streamer attached. We just rammed into each other (which is harder than it looks, when you don't have FPV) and whoever stayed in the air, won. We had a ZagNutz lose one of it's wingtip vertical stabilizers, and it kept flying with just a little instability in yaw. I had been making the vertical stabilizers smaller and smaller, trying to see how much drag I could get rid of, without losing stability, so we knew that the vertical stabilizers were larger than they actually had to be. The guy that lost a stabilizer decided to take the one on the other wingtip off, just to see what would happen, and it flew. At high speeds, there is a little 'wagging the tail' in the yaw axis, but it doesn't seem to really be a problem. As you reduce the speed, the yawing gets more pronounced, until at a slow speed (where it would still be controllable if it had vertical stabilizers on the tips) the wing will essentially do a stall-spin maneuver. Could be a bit disorienting with FPV, though. Simple solution would be to cut some small stabilizers out of clear plastic. A few flight tests with various sizes of vertical stabilizer would quickly show how little vertical stabilizer you could get away with. |
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Quoted: B2 bomber would be pretty cool. It's a very complex aerodynamic design however. You'll need to do a good bit of research if you want it to fly with stability without vertical stabilizers. Either you need some drag rudder tricks, or a bit of gyro control. Or just cheat, and make your own version that has stabilizers. You don't have to worry about radar profiles after all lol. 1065 grams or about 2.3lbs. Quite light for what it is. Really gentle flier at this weight for as fast as it can go. View Quote |
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Sorry, it's actually stronger to print the pieces separately, and almost all of the pieces will not print properly if their bases aren't set on a build plate. How much they charging you for a whole plane? I've been doing $100 plus shipping for people that can't print one themselves. View Quote I've got a little delta here that I've been trying to get working, but at this point I'm probably going to give up and just buy a new cartesian and keep the existing one for spare parts. Kinda want to get a Rostock Max and then scale it up, but cartesians are easier. |
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Came here to see a big slimy fish.
Left undisappointed, sweet plane. |
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If you don't mind what flight controller and receiver are you using?
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Quoted: Not necessarily. Yes, things get a bit unsteady on the yaw axis, if your flying wing doesn't have any form of vertical stabilizer, but they can be flown. I used to build and fly a lot of variations of the ZagNutz, and flew combat with the guys at work, during lunch. We didn't use streamers, since one of the guys tried flying with a streamer (before brushless motors got affordable) and the motor could barely keep the plane in the air with the streamer attached. We just rammed into each other (which is harder than it looks, when you don't have FPV) and whoever stayed in the air, won. We had a ZagNutz lose one of it's wingtip vertical stabilizers, and it kept flying with just a little instability in yaw. I had been making the vertical stabilizers smaller and smaller, trying to see how much drag I could get rid of, without losing stability, so we knew that the vertical stabilizers were larger than they actually had to be. The guy that lost a stabilizer decided to take the one on the other wingtip off, just to see what would happen, and it flew. At high speeds, there is a little 'wagging the tail' in the yaw axis, but it doesn't seem to really be a problem. As you reduce the speed, the yawing gets more pronounced, until at a slow speed (where it would still be controllable if it had vertical stabilizers on the tips) the wing will essentially do a stall-spin maneuver. Could be a bit disorienting with FPV, though. Simple solution would be to cut some small stabilizers out of clear plastic. A few flight tests with various sizes of vertical stabilizer would quickly show how little vertical stabilizer you could get away with. View Quote Guess all I'm getting at is that it does need a little bit more research for someone who wants to design a flying wing but is unfamiliar with the aerodynamic pitfalls they can bring. If you want to make one without a lot of the problems, copy a flying wing model that everybody already loves, and look for something with minimal sweep (which will also help with getting the correct cg without needing to load up the nose with weight). Quoted:
I haven't tried to price it with them. It would probably be at least double that. It looks like you've got five parts just for the forward fuselage, and I see glue lines on the wings that say there are six or so segments per wing -- and the least this place has charged me was $15 for something smaller than any single one of those pieces. My design was a thinwall shell too, basically a pair of adjacent joined tubes for a prototype, so minuscule plastic volume. I've got a little delta here that I've been trying to get working, but at this point I'm probably going to give up and just buy a new cartesian and keep the existing one for spare parts. Kinda want to get a Rostock Max and then scale it up, but cartesians are easier. View Quote Quoted:
If you don't mind what flight controller and receiver are you using? View Quote |
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Quoted:
Yeah, if it's gonna be that expensive, I'd be buying a cheaper printed for the same price and print my own. View Quote Putting it together is turning out to take longer than I expected. Stayed up late, last night, and got through part 1 of the two part assembly video that the manufacturer (I think it was the manufacturer) put on youtube. |
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What printer do you have? View Quote Quoted: My ANET A8 kit was $139.99 shipped, but there are 'safety upgrades' that will end up adding a bit to the total cost. Putting it together is turning out to take longer than I expected. Stayed up late, last night, and got through part 1 of the two part assembly video that the manufacturer (I think it was the manufacturer) put on youtube. View Quote |
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Yeah, I thought about getting one of those as my first printer. Had one ordered, and then they took a month and still didn't ship it so I canceled. Got several friends who have one, and after the safety and upgrades are taken care of they get pretty good prints out of them. View Quote The confirmation email indicated that the earliest I could expect it, would be the middle of next week, so I thought it was coming from China. Shipped from some place in New Jersey, and FedEx dropped it off a little after 5pm on Thursday. Working on electrical problems with the Jeep, today, but I may get back to assembling the printer, tonight. |
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Quoted:
Working on electrical problems with the Jeep, today, but I may get back to assembling the printer, tonight. View Quote Swapped the front end to a 1960's rhino grill and now they work when the headlights are off. When the headlights are on, one side has trouble again. Must be another short somewhere or wiring was fiddled with in the past. Attached File |
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Quoted: Hah, that's what I'm messing with as well. Turn signals on one side weren't working at all. Swapped the front end to a 1960's rhino grill and now they work when the headlights are off. When the headlights are on, one side has trouble again. Must be another short somewhere or wiring was fiddled with in the past. https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/102216/20180915_122146-1612x1209-672365.JPG View Quote Works just fine with a standard bulb. Apparently, the front turn signals on the XJ are wired to switch polarity to the bulb when the headlights are on (does the same thing on the other side). At some point, I'll have to sit down with the wiring diagram and solve that puzzle. Today, I'm dealing with some repairs/mods that a previous owner did while installing a radio and rewiring the cig lighter. I'm not getting power to the cig lighter, and I bought a power module (jack for cig lighter power plugs, plus two USB power jacks) that I'm going to try to squeeze in as a replacement for the cig lighter. The radio is only working on one speaker, and I'm considering installing a Raspberry Pi 3 with a touch screen, so I'm looking at how much dash space I can free up by pulling the radio. |
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Got the kit put together. Leveled the bed, which was a bit tedious, but not as bad as I had been expecting, based on what I had read. Somehow made my way through the menus to tell it to print one of the gcode files that came on the card.
...and it printed. No flames (not even any smoke). No pieces flying off. No jumbled mess of plastic. I was actually surprised at how well it went. Now if I had remembered to order spools of filament, when I ordered the kit (which came with a small amount of filament)... |
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Quoted:
Got the kit put together. Leveled the bed, which was a bit tedious, but not as bad as I had been expecting, based on what I had read. Somehow made my way through the menus to tell it to print one of the gcode files that came on the card. ...and it printed. No flames (not even any smoke). No pieces flying off. No jumbled mess of plastic. I was actually surprised at how well it went. Now if I had remembered to order spools of filament, when I ordered the kit (which came with a small amount of filament)... View Quote |
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Quoted: I buy a lot of my filament off of Amazon. May not always be the cheapest, but the shipping is fast. View Quote Messed with Cura enough to be able to slice an .stl file and tinker with the print settings. I'm still very rusty with CAD. Printing the upgrades will give me plenty of time to learn. |
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Quoted:
How is the plane holding up so far? View Quote Pike Splat I believe that was the 17th flight, and the only wear and tear was a weak glue joint on the fuse after a hard landing. That was easily fixed with just a bit more glue. |
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Attached File
ELectronics all survived, but I think I'll just print another one rather than fix this. $16-17 of plastic is cheap. |
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Quoted:
https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/102216/194711_2d4264c74d8497f788d81250fb96385a-684181.JPG ELectronics all survived, but I think I'll just print another one rather than fix this. $16-17 of plastic is cheap. View Quote That is the great think about these, you can just print up another one! Do you think you will change anything with the new one? |
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Quoted: Ouch! That is the great think about these, you can just print up another one! Do you think you will change anything with the new one? View Quote Also shrunk stuff down and have printed a mini 27" version I need to glue up. Attached File Red and green highlights for better orientation. Might also put some LED's inside it for night flying. |
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That slips into the territory of "I don't care how well it flies, the looks are enough justification to expend resources to make it fly".
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That's wicked looking!
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Quoted:
EDF? https://i.imgur.com/suAPisL.jpg https://i.imgur.com/D8EBHj2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Mac3sfi.jpg https://i.imgur.com/S3bYuPV.jpg View Quote Wish that ducted fan builds cpuld get more than max 4-6 minutes of flight time they seem to all have. But could be useful for a TBS Crossfire build with a gopro pod for flying at high speed along some mountain ridges. Looking forward to footage of how it flies. |
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Diverging topic a bit...
Not long ago, I stumbled across a youtube video that discussed how early on in the development of quadcopters, tricopters were getting really popular, because the yaw response with the tilting tail unit was better than could be obtained with the quadcopters, at that time. Then the software and hardware got better, and quadcopters took over the market, because they were so much easier (no servos). One of the guys in the video was trying to bring back the tricopters and had built a small one using the newer tech. They flew it for the video, and the evaluation was that it still needed a little polishing, but was a nice little copter. Then they moved on to discussing another project the guy had. A twincopter. It had a tail with sort of an inverted v-tail for stability in forward flight, but lift was purely from the two motors. While the quadcopter has no servos, and the tricopter uses a single servo to tilt the tail motor so that it can angle to the left or right for yaw control, the twincopter uses two servos, allowing either motor to be angled forward or aft. They flew his prototype, and it was manageable in hover and forward flight, but something in the control system reacted in a very negative way to rearward flight (still needs work). All I could think, was that once the bugs are worked out, there are a lot of science fiction VTOLs that can be built as scale RC, using that system. Both copter systems with a lift motor on pylons on either side, and craft that transition like the V-22. ...and 3D printing is likely to be the best option for making them. |
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Quoted: That slips into the territory of "I don't care how well it flies, the looks are enough justification to expend resources to make it fly". View Quote Quoted: Looks like something I could use to hunt/harpoon wildlife with. Wish that ducted fan builds cpuld get more than max 4-6 minutes of flight time they seem to all have. But could be useful for a TBS Crossfire build with a gopro pod for flying at high speed along some mountain ridges. Looking forward to footage of how it flies. View Quote At least if I want to fly longer I can bust out the pike and get 12 minute flights. Finding a good landing strip up in the mountains could be hard. I suppose I could chuck it off a cliff by hand and get at least one flight. |
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Quoted:
Diverging topic a bit... Not long ago, I stumbled across a youtube video that discussed how early on in the development of quadcopters, tricopters were getting really popular, because the yaw response with the tilting tail unit was better than could be obtained with the quadcopters, at that time. Then the software and hardware got better, and quadcopters took over the market, because they were so much easier (no servos). One of the guys in the video was trying to bring back the tricopters and had built a small one using the newer tech. They flew it for the video, and the evaluation was that it still needed a little polishing, but was a nice little copter. Then they moved on to discussing another project the guy had. A twincopter. It had a tail with sort of an inverted v-tail for stability in forward flight, but lift was purely from the two motors. While the quadcopter has no servos, and the tricopter uses a single servo to tilt the tail motor so that it can angle to the left or right for yaw control, the twincopter uses two servos, allowing either motor to be angled forward or aft. They flew his prototype, and it was manageable in hover and forward flight, but something in the control system reacted in a very negative way to rearward flight (still needs work). All I could think, was that once the bugs are worked out, there are a lot of science fiction VTOLs that can be built as scale RC, using that system. Both copter systems with a lift motor on pylons on either side, and craft that transition like the V-22. ...and 3D printing is likely to be the best option for making them. View Quote If I wasn't so busy with other projects I'd buy one to tinker with, but that kind of coding isn't my forte. If/when they get the characteristics nailed down 3d printing some sci fi stuff would be pretty awesome. |
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Not sure how I missed this thread. Nice work OP... I used to fly and build model planes back in the day using gas engines. Compared to 3d printing, that was the stone age. I looked awhile back on thingaverse for stl's, but didn't really find anything. This looks awesome. I just can't figure out if I should print yours or that Corsair. I still have my retracts from my crashed 1/4 scale p51
Electric seems like so little fuss compared to gas powered. Finally something useful to print |
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Quoted:
Not sure how I missed this thread. Nice work OP... I used to fly and build model planes back in the day using gas engines. Compared to 3d printing, that was the stone age. I looked awhile back on thingaverse for stl's, but didn't really find anything. This looks awesome. I just can't figure out if I should print yours or that Corsair. I still have my retracts from my crashed 1/4 scale p51 Electric seems like so little fuss compared to gas powered. Finally something useful to print View Quote And yes, electric is a lot easier than flying slimers (electric RC term for glow engines). I got started in the mid-1970s. Played with a couple Cox control line models, but never got good at flying them (tended to crash just as I was beginning to think I was getting the hang of it). Built a Headmaster (rudder/elevator/throttle) trainer with a K&B .19, but couldn't scrape together the money for the radio gear. Around 2000, some guys at work got me interested in the electric stuff (nicads, FM radios, and speed 400 brushed motors), and I had a ball with it, until my neck got messed up in a car wreck in 2005 (hurt to look up, for several years after that). I've had a few spurts of getting back into the hobby, since then, but something always seems to get in the way. The battery tech is constantly evolving. The electronics seem to evolve much faster than the battery tech. Take a year off from the hobby, then check back to see what's going on, and it feel like you're a newb again, with a pile of stuff to learn. ...and then 3D printers come along. |
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