sub 250g RC plane
Hardware- 2 Devlogs
- 2 Total hours
3D printed design, aiming for 150+kph
3D printed design, aiming for 150+kph
I have made a cradle that the plane can sit on during take off and the cradle will be left behind after take off to minimise weight and drag during flight. The cradle is quite simple and chunky because it will be discarded after take off so there is no point making it aero, and I don’t want it to break so it is designed to be chunky.
resoldered a faulty servo and built the wings
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I have been working on this project before I joined hackclub, so here is some background info on my plane.
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I designed this plane on fusion 360, it took probably at least 60ish hours including all the tests and iterations, but I don’t know how to upload that so that 60 hours down the drain. This is the 7th iteration after doing countless tests on cfd.
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My initial goal was 100kph, but I decided to go even bigger after doing cfd testing (that took absolutely ages on my laptop). I designed the wings to be printed in spiral vase mode which was also a pain cuz the slicer just kept putting holes in my wing which is super annoying. There are still some jagged edges on the trailing edge, but I have given up with trying to fix that. The fixed model to hair loss ratio was just not worth it.
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The tail was designed to have built in hinges which worked surprisingly well with just PLA. they just need a bit of a wiggle and they worked fine (slightly stiff but still usable).
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I printed the whole plane in LW PLA and the wing root plus the tail in normal PLA for a bit more strength, but looking at it; I think the wing root would work just fine in LW PLA and that would save another 10 grams.
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The motor I am using right now is not great for the purpose of this aircraft, because it is designed for efficiency, but it is the only one I have lying around right now. I will swap it out with something more suitable for this aircraft in the future when further developing this plane.