Bought one of those little Dart planes from RMRC at Flite Fest Ohio, it's a mini Cuda clone type plane. Flew great for being small, so I thought I'd make it 3D printable and a bit bigger to account for the weight of 3D printed parts.



Started drawing stuff up yesterday and here's what I've got.











The eyes, mouth, and teeth are all part of the model, and will show up when printing. Should make it very easy to paint, or add some tape or something.



We'll have to see where final weights line up, but I'm hoping to run an F to B pack sized motor on either 3 or 4 s. The nose has been lengthened a good bit from standard cuda configurations to try and make balancing easier. I think a couple 1300mah batts side by side up in the nose will do the job. If not, there's provisions for an FPV camera to add a bit more nose weight. Worst comes to worst, I can always make the nose a bit longer.



The majority of the fiddly bits on the model are done, but I am going to have to set aside something like 5-6 hours to complete the lightening holes in the spars. Hole cutting aside, it's amazing how much easier it is to draw up a simple plane like this compared to a scale aircraft. I'll also be trying out a new cad technique here to try and make the file manageable and not bog down my PC. I'm doing everything possible to get it ready for printing before cutting spar holes. Once all the groundwork is done, I can make each printable section it's own component, and then cut holes. That should hopefully make my life easier from a processor bottleneck standpoint.

If that works out, I have a couple of other designs in the backlog that really need more work. I want them finished, so if I I have to chop some stuff up into separate files and redo some things, it'l be worth it.


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Latest flight printed in PETG:

36" Pike PETG Version Maiden 8.12.18 (6 min 37 sec)

ETA: It Flies!!

36" 3D Printed Northern Pike Maiden Flight (6 min 24 sec)

I've posted the files over on Thingiverse for the 36" version. They're free, but if you want to donate something via paypal or tip me on thingiverse I won't say no.



https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3040294

This looks fantastic! You sure got some skills with 3D programs.
Do you know what wing profile you need?

I was just thinking this design would be a good one for 3d printing and here you are modeling it up...Awesome!
I look forward to seeing it fly.

Great model!!! What program are you working with?

Localfriend,
Another nice looking unconventional airplane. Looking forward to seeing this one fly. What happen to the other canard type airplane you were building about 6 months ago? Did you ever complete it?

Originally Posted by Thoemse

This looks fantastic! You sure got some skills with 3D programs.
Do you know what wing profile you need?

You asking what airfoil I went with? I've attached a picture of it to this post. It's nothing too radical. Basic sport airfoil, not quite flat bottomed, with what I'm hoping is enough built in reflex to not need any setup fiddling. We'll see. It's always hard to judge just how much reflex is needed on a flying wing, and I don't have much forward swept experience.

Originally Posted by benz11

Great model!!! What program are you working with?

Fusion 360. It's free for hobby use and startups. Pretty awesome program. Been slowly teaching myself to use it leaving a long string of uncompleted projects behind me.

Originally Posted by farmertom

Localfriend,
Another nice looking unconventional airplane. Looking forward to seeing this one fly. What happen to the other canard type airplane you were building about 6 months ago? Did you ever complete it?

It's not done yet. Way more complex than this one. It's going to take some file splitting like I planned ahead for on this one. The supports inside the fuselage became so intricate that I need to buy a new PC or start splitting things up. I'm considering just redoing the fuse for that one. Might do something like I'm doing with this one, where the wing root and fuselage are the same printable piece.

ETA:

Somebody requested a timelapse on the FT Forum. Best I can do is Fusion 360's timeline replay tool.

Northern Pike - Fusion 360 3D Printed RC Plane Design (5 min 6 sec)

Well, after 5 hours of work, I got lightening holes into 5 of the 7 wing sections. Took me longer than I was remembering. Probably because I made the spars a bit more dense on this plane than normal. I want the wings to stay stiff, forward sweep is not something you want to flex.

At least I've got enough to fill up a build plate. Got the completed sections for the left and right wings printing on two different printers right now.

I'll start tackling the rest of the parts tomorrow evening.

Printers finished up the stuff I had drawn this morning.







You can see the tongue and groove assembly I settled on. This lets you easily just slot the wing together without having to mess with alignment tabs for gluing. This will make getting perfect CA joints very easy, and the tongue and groove material doubles as an additional heavy duty spar right where it's needed. Should be easier to assemble than most of the 3D lab prints stuff.

Wow, very nice. 3dpqbs do this with their new corsair too. Much, much better than alignment tabs. Looks fantastic!

I like that tongue and groove method. Looking good man!

That tongue and groove joining is awesome! Very nice work!

Tongue an groove is what 3dlabs does on their Dusty.

It's sorta almost like Cellular wing construction used on Metal planes.
You get a nice I-Beam spar effect out of it.

So what happened to the Hughes project ?

The method doesn't only make glueing easier. The wings end up very stiff too.

Ah, didn't realize they had done the same thing as early as the Dusty. First tried this method out on the Hall Bulldog, which I'll need to get back to, as well as the Devastator. The tongue and groove method is heavy, but sometimes, on a plane that needs a lot of wing stiffness, it's worth it. Or unavoidable if it's big.

Got all the lightening holes cut into the spars for the entire back half of the plane. Decided to check out some other colors rather than keep staring at circles.













I think any translucent filament will look pretty awesome, but green with a red painted mouth is my favorite so far.

When are you going to make a normal plane?

Very nice renders!