Bat Bone build and reference

bmacw

Junior Member
It was a huge struggle to find reference info on the size of the bat bone frame. Especially because my plan is to shortened the booms and make it more compact.

The good news is it's really easy and cheap to buy extra 1/2in booms and experiment.

Today I received my bat bone frame, and started playing. Immediate I realized the width of the frame is much wider than I had imagined.

Anyhow here are a few pictures with the shortened arms. Hopefully it will help someone else with similar goals.

As you can see, if all the booms are the same length, the motors will not quite be the same distance from each others. I'm not sure if that's by design from FT. Of course once I started shortening the arms equally the gap gets bigger.

I'm really a noob in multicopters. I would think I should try my best to make them equal distance. Should I keep the same ratio as the original ratio from FT build (10in booms) or just make them exactly equal?

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I'm waiting for some breakaway motor mounts and a better tail mount to finish the build.

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C0d3M0nk3y

Posted a thousand or more times
It was a huge struggle to find reference info on the size of the bat bone frame. Especially because my plan is to shortened the booms and make it more compact.

FT has plans available for a lot of the kits they sell. Here's the Bat Bone.
 
From what I understand from the bat bone is that ft kicked the front booms out on purpose so you don't get the props in your camera. If I were you and was planning on this tricopter to have fpv or a gopro, I would not shorten the booms at all because for sure, you will get the props in the view and also, the shorter the booms are, the less stable its going to be. Hope this helped.
 

cranialrectosis

Faster than a speeding face plant!
Mentor
The Bat Bone frame is a bit wide to try a mini. Still, I have been considering chopping mine down for a while.

I'll be very interested to see what you come up with. :)
 

FinalGlideAus

terrorizing squirrels
I cut my booms down to minimum size to improve performance and it went quite nice. It's the first time the old girl has been out of the storage room since March. :)

For learning on just keep the booms the stock length. You won't notice any difference.
 

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bmacw

Junior Member
From what I understand from the bat bone is that ft kicked the front booms out on purpose so you don't get the props in your camera. If I were you and was planning on this tricopter to have fpv or a gopro, I would not shorten the booms at all because for sure, you will get the props in the view and also, the shorter the booms are, the less stable its going to be. Hope this helped.

The trade of of stability, agility and compactness is expected.

But I'm curious why the from booms are 96-100 degree(rough measurement) instead of 120 if it was meant for FPV.
 

bmacw

Junior Member
The Bat Bone frame is a bit wide to try a mini. Still, I have been considering chopping mine down for a while.

I'll be very interested to see what you come up with. :)

I guess, I was only paying attention to the arm length , when I picked the kit. Someone did a 8.5 in arm build, like I said , I was more interested in the geometry, and how everything would look when it's chopped. That's why I started the thread.

The way bat bone frame is designed, it does not make too much sense to chop the booms. Because for compactness, the determine factors are the frame width and the tail boom length. And if you want to keep the same distances between all motors. Ever inch you cut off the two from booms would only yield a very small fraction of length reduction on the tail boom.

Unless, I just cut all the booms short equal length, which I now know does not really maintain the ideal geometry.
 

bmacw

Junior Member
I cut my booms down to minimum size to improve performance and it went quite nice. It's the first time the old girl has been out of the storage room since March. :)

For learning on just keep the booms the stock length. You won't notice any difference.

Thanks for the picture. That's worth 100000 words.

Do you have any advice on the tail boom length? Since it's actually closer motor to motor for tail than the two front arms on yours.
 

FinalGlideAus

terrorizing squirrels
At the time I just tried to get the props as close in as possible to get it flying as twitchy as possible and tested this to see if it had any weird tendencies and it flew fine.

My advice is try and get it as symmetrical as possible (while keeping the center point where the FC is) within reason and don't get too worried about it.
 

bmacw

Junior Member
At the time I just tried to get the props as close in as possible to get it flying as twitchy as possible and tested this to see if it had any weird tendencies and it flew fine.

My advice is try and get it as symmetrical as possible (while keeping the center point where the FC is) within reason and don't get too worried about it.

I did exactly as advised here. Kept the motor to motor distance the same.

I have now 6.75 in front booms and 8.5 tail boom. Got the Fortis motor mounts and yaw parts. They are better designed and allows me to just zip tie the motor directly on top of the boom.

My cumulative piloting experience consists of flying a nano qx in my room for less than 2 hours. And maiden of my previous build 300mm frame.
This one flew perfectly. So I think I'm happy with the results for now. If I ever change the boom length again, I will report back. But for now unless I can tell the damn difference my opinion is worthless. :D


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bmacw

Junior Member
I added the the gopro to the camera plate. With 3S 2200 on 8inch props. It was having trouble hovering at 65-70% throttle and 5min flight time. It was pushing 950g. Put on some 10x5 props, it flew much better, handles the weight perfectly fine on the same motor and battery.