Hello from Australia - and a 3d printing design tip.

jkexpress

New member
Hi guys,

love the site and videos and very tempted to fly over for the Flitefest. We would love to setup a flitetest distribution in Australia as the shipping and local availability of foam is poor.

I have built the FT Spitfire, an FFF Eagle and Infinion all in foam board. Slowly building my flying skills but it is all fun. My passion started when my uncle gave me a Mills 0.75cc Diesel and I read some old books in the library from the 50's. I have since found these books in an antique shop and shared them on a great site : https://aerofred.com/

I 3d print parts and just had to add exhausts and a pilot to the Spitfire. A tip for people that are not CAD designers is the new Windows 10.... has a program for free called 3d Builder. It is really basic and painful but it has ONE great feature.
You can import an image and based on the lines and shading it can build a model directly off the image.

Example attached. Use Insert then the "+" sign and Import Image. You have to play with the settings but is is very handy for curved objects instead of building them up. If your 3d printer isn't supported then simply export STL to your own printing program.

spitfire.JPG

regards

Julian
 

jhitesma

Some guy in the desert
Mentor
I wanted to hate 3D Builder because it's MS and comes automatically with W10 and I just generally don't trust anything like that.

But honestly I've been somewhat impressed by it. I mean it's no Fusion 360 by any means...but it is powerful enough to do some real work in while also being simple enough to run on really basic/outdated computers and can be picked up fairly easily by someone with minimal prior modeling experience. (possibly even easier than by someone with pre-set expectations ;) )

I wasn't aware of that particular capability and am glad to have learned about it! Thanks very much for the tip!