Airbus A350 - 900 in 2 mm Depron!

quorneng

Master member
Keeping up with the '3D printed components' it seemed logical to use them to secure the Depron fin and tail plane particularly as the tail has dihedral so built in two pieces.
It also meant the whole tail could be built as a complete structural unit which can be simply glued glued onto the fuselage skin.
TailFin1.JPG

As each control surface has its own servo there are only servo wires to be run forward inside the fuselage.
The elevators are top tape hinged but the rudder uses three 3D printed hinges.
RudderHinge.jpg
The hinges are printed progressively smaller to match the reducing thickness of the fin & rudder assembly.
TailFin3.JPG

Once the fuselage skin is made good around the tail it carries all the loads directly into the fuselage.
The APU tail cone is also 3D printed.
Now comes the rather tedious and fiddly process of connecting it all up.
My eye sight is not quite what it used to be for soldering 32 AWG servo wire connections!;)
 

quorneng

Master member
To keep things simple the elevator servos are built into the fuselage with a short link to the horn.
RHeleSrvo.JPG

The rudder servo is built into the fin. All servo are micro 3.7 g.
An unusual view of the elevator and rudder servo wires running down the rear fuselage.
ServoWires.JPG

These servos are the only components actually in the fuselage everything else is built into the wing.
The battery box is part of the wing.
BattBox.JPG

In this way only the elevator and rudder servos need to be disconnected to remove the wing but for CofG reasons the battery box has to be placed a bit ahead of the wing fairing so a corresponding hole is made in the fuselage to accept it.
WingMntC.JPG

The wing itself is retained by three M4 nylon bolts with threaded retainers built into the fuselage.

As I have no idea if it will fly or be capable of landing without major damage to the engine nacelles I will break with my normal tradition and decorate it before its maiden.
 

quorneng

Master member
To keep weight down the chosen colour scheme is intended to give a 'stand off' impression rather than the fine detail.
Tailpaint.JPG

The vast majority is white so the white Depron only needed a dusting coat of acrylic white. The purple was of course a bit heavier in proportion but made a good job of covering up the area of skin replaced after installing the rudder and elevator servos. For further simplicity the gold and pink bands are just strips if "sticky backed" plastic!
No passenger windows just those for the cockpit as they are fairly obvious.
09Jun18.JPG

The inside of the engine nacelles are left the pale green of the printed PLA if only to emphasise that they are!
To my amazement, and great relief, it flies very nicely and is particularly smooth with the rx stab function on.
It does have scale size ailerons so you have to remember it has a roll rate like....er... an airliner!
 
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AkimboGlueGuns

Biplane Guy
Mentor
Looks like she flies very nice! I might have to try an airliner like this over the winter. Now what to do? 787 or L1011?
 

FoamyDM

Building Fool-Flying Noob
Moderator
wow! inspirational... One thing I noticed is there are very few Airlines models, which always surprised me. can you detail out the printing aspect. Wall thicknesses, material, maker etc.?
 

quorneng

Master member
FoamyDM
Yes airliners are relative few and far between I suspect because they give a relatively poor performance for the effort required to build them.
This build was no kit in any sense of the word.
It was actually built from a "3 view" blown up and printed to the required size along with lots of pictures downloaded from the internet.
Apart from the "electrics" it was built up almost entirely from 2 mm Depron (pieces cut from sheet) with 'own designed' 3D printed components and a very small amount of hard 2 mm balsa for the wing spar flanges.
The actual construction also needed quite a bit of trial and error to get the right compromise between weight and strength as well a good measure of past experience from building other RC planes using similar techniques.

The driving force behind building the A350 was not so much "build an airliner" but to find a practical use for light and powerful racing drone motors along with their small multi blade props.
Due to the popularity of "drones" a wide range is now readily available and remarkably cheap.