Ornithopter plans ?

[steve lewin]

I realise this may be close to sacrilege in this "Park Hawk" forum ;) but does anyone know of any plans available for R/C ornithopters ? Call me old-fashioned but I'd rather build things than buy them. I built a rubber powered indoor one many years ago but a bigger R/C version would be a real challenge.

Steve

[steve lewin]

I'll take that as a "No" then shall I ?

Why bother with design or building when you can just throw money at someone else to do it for you :( ? Ah well I suppose that's the way it's going all over.

Steve

[Ed Couch]

Steve,I have no idea of how long you have been in the business of flying toy airplanes, I have over 45 years flying rubber to turbines and except for one gas engine powered very semi-successful ornithopter and a few rubber powered models there is nothing. Kinkades little bird is the first commercial good flying air vehicle released. I'm a scratch builder and have not bought a kit of anything other than a GWS Stick in years. But by far this is the best value for the money I've seen in a long time. I wanted to reverse engineer this bird to a smaller lighter version for indoors but Sean has beat me to it with a smaller version on the way in the future. I've spent two plus years working on an indoor version and can make them fly but not climb out, all I wanted was a simple figure-8 in a gym, ain't quite that easy. I dropped the coins to see how it was done, money well spent. Also, don't get uptight when someone doesn't respond to your request, if there is no real answers. Remember no one owes you anything and illmanners will get you shut down real quick. In this case, there was simply nothing to say. ed

[Nate W]

If you want to build, I'll make some plans. Just one caveat: I cannot guarantee that the resulting machine will actually fly. :)

I've been searching the web for ornithopter info for a couple days now, and like Ed said, there just isn't much out there at all. I was hoping to find one with folding wings and aileron control, but it seems that if I want these features I'll have to design and build something myself. Now I'm trying to figure out if I want it bad enough...

[steve lewin]

Thanks for the offer Nate but my skills are also just about good enough to draw something that might not fly ;). As you say it may come to that.

Ed, thanks for your reply but I'm not uptight so much as surprised that no-one seems interested in doing any design/building in this area. Maybe the only way is to buy one and reverse it but I haven't found anyone on the continent where I live who's selling these things and import from over your way gets a bit expensive with the shipping, custom duties, taxes etc. Never mind, just another thing to put on the "one day" list.

Steve

[krajesj]

Steve,
I just ran into this article from The Farm Show newspaper. Their web site is << www.farmshow.com >>. In their volume 26, number 4, 2002 issue (the current one) on page 10 they have a story about a guy that built one. He used to be a falconer? and made a living out of keeping birds away from airports and golf courses with a falcon. He has since teamed up with an ornithopic researcher and come up with an R/C gas or electric ornithoptic falcon. He says he only rents it out now, but there may be more information available. It looks really cool in flight on their web site!
Hope this helps,
Steve

[niek]

That's the commercial version of Kinkade's Skybird, the big brother of the ParkHawk.
The company who is selling these, even give fly-lessons.

Iso hiring us, to make some money out of our hobby...

[niek]

Some good pdfs on ornithopter wing design theoretics at:

http://www.ornithopter.net/research.html

The second link is a good no math not to theoretical one.

[niek]

From my personal experience:
The hard part of an Rc-ornithopter is the gearbox and wing flapping mechanics.

At first try, you just can't believe what kind of forces it must able to handle at, lets say, 1m span.

Quite different from a toy 'tim bird'. (15 inch)

Some first still not succesfull tryouts with lots of photos from some friends and me at:
http://forum.modelvliegen.com (dutch text only)


Now we understand why ornithopters like SkyBird and CyBird are checkbook modelling only..


But we are not giving up yet!

[Sparr]

Ever since I heard of the parkhawk I have contemplated trying to build a micro ornithopter, something to work with the really micro servos (<3g) and perhaps a CF/mylar construction. Having purchased a parkhawk I can already see that I was looking in a dozen wrong directions. Having such a professional product available has given me not only an excellent addition to my hangar but also inspiration.