Spacefarer
Active member
Hey, it's been a long time but I figured now that I'm getting into rc flight a lot more formally with my AIAA club in college, I should start posting again. My build style has been refined a lot in the last few years and I think this is one of my best builds yet in terms of utility. It's a standard long range/endurance focused V-tail setup with a box fuselage and wing reminiscent of experimental airlines' stuff from years ago, but I tried to optimize the construction a bit. The wing is a scaled version of my own modular airfoil design, and it's almost entirely hollow. I wanted to avoid using significant spacer foam like you see in a standard armin wing, so I distribute the load from the main spar to the top and bottom using a secondary foam spar. For this model, I used a carbon fiber rod since it's going to be carrying extra heavy battery loads.
At this scale, you do need at least a few formers if you want to get a completely smooth curve along the top of the airfoil, but I'm fine with the slight point since it probably doesn't exceed the performance loss of the ribs.
The wing interfaces to the fuselage using a 3d printed wing strap which is held on to the fuselage using landing gear wire (it goes into that little hole in the side like a skewer). I chose this setup to avoid the hassle of replacing rubber bands and figuring out how to keep skewers from falling out of the side of the fuselage, because I can just use a few landing gear collars to hold the wire in place.
The fuselage is 7.5 cm wide on the outside, and is essentially just a big box beam. I only covered the two bottom corners with tape because this is a belly lander like all of my planes. It has a very simple conic nose that I cut using a 3d printed stencil I took from the cad model I used to plan this build.
My personal favorite part of this design is the tail, because I modified the double-sided master series tail method seen on the master series F-16 and created a central hinge using foamboard that can't delaminate as easily. It's always been a pain for me to have to repair my control surface hinges because the paper peeled off on the inside, so this design is a huge relief. Here you can see the net and the final product.
I'm hoping to maiden this within the next week or two depending on scheduling for finals, and I'll be sure to post how it flies!
At this scale, you do need at least a few formers if you want to get a completely smooth curve along the top of the airfoil, but I'm fine with the slight point since it probably doesn't exceed the performance loss of the ribs.
The wing interfaces to the fuselage using a 3d printed wing strap which is held on to the fuselage using landing gear wire (it goes into that little hole in the side like a skewer). I chose this setup to avoid the hassle of replacing rubber bands and figuring out how to keep skewers from falling out of the side of the fuselage, because I can just use a few landing gear collars to hold the wire in place.
The fuselage is 7.5 cm wide on the outside, and is essentially just a big box beam. I only covered the two bottom corners with tape because this is a belly lander like all of my planes. It has a very simple conic nose that I cut using a 3d printed stencil I took from the cad model I used to plan this build.
My personal favorite part of this design is the tail, because I modified the double-sided master series tail method seen on the master series F-16 and created a central hinge using foamboard that can't delaminate as easily. It's always been a pain for me to have to repair my control surface hinges because the paper peeled off on the inside, so this design is a huge relief. Here you can see the net and the final product.
I'm hoping to maiden this within the next week or two depending on scheduling for finals, and I'll be sure to post how it flies!
