Last year, Mark H (who blogs at Eastbay RC got me into the world of building RC airplanes. While my early attempts were limited in their overall successfulness (I demonstrated that I was awfully good at snapping props) I have been keeping up in my interest, and slowly acquiring more tools and hardware. Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to serve as a mentor to some local students and one of them expressed a desire to build his own RC airplane. I had recently been inspired by the great videos by Ed Orsine of the Experimental Airlines Youtube channel, so we decided that constructing an Axon, one of his designs would be a cool design to try:
A lot of it can be constructed with just Dollar tree foam and packing tape. But i recently got access to a 3D printer, and I thought it might be cool to fabricate some parts using that. A good candidate was the motor mount: we wanted the motor to be firmly held, with the appropriate 5 degrees of down angle. I just recently started teaching myself how to design simple parts using OpenSCAD. It bills itself as the “Programmer’s Solid 3D Cad Modeller”, and I couldn’t agree more: it plays right into my skillset. I’ve made an printed a few objects, and for these kind of purely functional 3D objects, I found it to be easy and straightforward.
The basic idea is to make a little plastic bracket that can be mounted at the end of a piece of 5/8″ square wood which is held with mounting tape inside the main fuselage. It took me about twenty minutes to design, and it went through a couple of minor tweaks before it got to it’s final form. And here it is, mounted in my student’s plane:
Mark H. thought it might be of interest to others in the builder/RC community, so I placed it up on thingiverse. Feel free to download it and print it, and let me know of you find it of value.
If all goes as well, we’ll have our first maiden flight of our resulting aircraft, and video and pictures coming soon.