3D/Foamboard High Performance F-16 Discussion and Design

telnar1236 · Sep 25, 2025

Mr Man said:
Yup, it could definitely be done with foam board, the fastest I've gone with foam board was 155mph. And I know Joshua's Sharknado went faster (with triple the power) But I'd love to see a foam board EDF hit 150! (then I'd have an excuse to buy an EDF 😂)

How many watts did your plane end up pulling?

telnar1236 · Sep 25, 2025

I won't say never, but a 150 mph foam board EDF strikes me as unlikely without a lot of it not being foam board. The combined low thrust of an EDF unit and high drag of a foam board airframe doesn't strike me as particularly good for speed

Mr Man · Sep 25, 2025

telnar1236 said:
How many watts did your plane end up pulling?

Probably around 1100

Mr Man · Sep 25, 2025

1100-1300

Houndpup Rc · Sep 25, 2025

telnar1236 said:
I won't say never, but a 150 mph foam board EDF strikes me as unlikely without a lot of it not being foam board. The combined low thrust of an EDF unit and high drag of a foam board airframe doesn't strike me as particularly good for speed

I feel the same 👍 (Especially with EDF...)

Houndpup Rc · Oct 3, 2025

All done! JK 😂 I was having a hard time getting it to look to scale, and then @Mr Man found me this already made design in Onshape. So now what I’m going to do is make each part its own piece (since it’s basically all one piece!) so I can edit it, shell it out, and make my internal structure

nternal structure.

Houndpup Rc · Oct 3, 2025

Got the nose hollowed out! For some reason its not allowing me to shell some of the parts, so I am just thickening like .0001" and then delete the inside and then thicken inward the thickness of my walls.

Houndpup Rc · Oct 3, 2025

Nose cone done!

Houndpup Rc · Oct 3, 2025

telnar1236 said:
AI seems to really like thicker skins on 3D prints for some reason. If you're using LW-PLA, a 0.8mm skin is ok, although not really necessary most of the time, but with normal PLA, you would end up with and extraordinarily heavy plane for its size. You basically never want a skin over 0.4 mm. Some slight deformation will basically always happen in the skin of an airplane under load - you can even see it in full scale ones - and it's not necessarily a bad thing. All I'll give Chat GPT is that it's better than Gemini on this particular recommendation - I was curious what a plane designed by Gemini would look like a couple months ago and it suggested a 1.6-2mm skin in one place which is even less practical.

As a whole I'd take AI suggestions on how to build a plane with about a whole shaker of salt. It's a fairly niche hobby and AI clearly doesn't have enough data to give reliable answers on it just yet.

I wonder if its confusing balsa building with 3D building...Also 3D printed planes seems to be quite a new thing...