Foamy flying wing
01-02-2015, 08:24 PM
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Foamy flying wing
Fellas,
I'm staring down the barrel of the next two months of my millwright apprenticeship and I'm bored already. So what did I do? I put on some bowie and daydreamed about riding a rocket rhinoceros millennium falcon in space for a bit, then pondered what a Martian Patrick Swazey might look like, then I settled on building a foam flying wing with the goal of turning it into a uav someday. Some background:
I've never built anything like this before, nor flown an rc plane ever. In fact, when I finish this, i'm not going to admit I built it because rc planes are for nerds. When my friends found out I was driving a fiat 500 to work, I had to take the biggest guy in the company out to the parking lot and let him call it names for 15 minutes. To this day, they think I'm the kind of fellow who goes home and kicks back with a pug in his lap.
I hate pugs.
I like the Vought V-173, so I'm working in that direction, but in the mean time, i'm going to start with a nice flying vee NACA 0016, maybe 36". I also know dick all about radio control electronics, so help a brother out, won't you?
After battling a 4x8 sheet of 1.5" eps into the back of a fiat in the wind in -20 degrees C, I set to building a foam cutter. I used 6' of 1.5" ABS, some 20 gauge stainless wire and a laptop power supply (65W, 24V, 3.5A, don't ask me, all I know about electricity is that part of the electrician trade exam is chasing a millwright around a huge room with a bunch of ladders trying to set them up where they're as much in his way as possible, with master electrician status going to the man who can set a ladder up in a millwright's cheerios early in the morning before he even notices there's a goddamn electrician in his kitchen) on a dimmer switch. It cuts beautifully at the lowest dimmer setting, so tomorrow I'm going to draw up a non-tapering wing and cut some plywood templates to glue to the side of the foam to use as a guide for the wire. I have some initial questions:
Once I have 2 wings cut out and waiting to be joined and sparred, how do I align them on the horizontal plane to maximize the effect of the airfoil? Should they be twisted on the longest axis such that the bottom of the wing is parallel to the bench? Does this count as dihedral, and is it crucial to the success of an airfoil? Attached are pictures of the cutter, because, let's be honest, it's pretty sick. I will be putting more tension on the wire before using it on an actual wing.
I'm staring down the barrel of the next two months of my millwright apprenticeship and I'm bored already. So what did I do? I put on some bowie and daydreamed about riding a rocket rhinoceros millennium falcon in space for a bit, then pondered what a Martian Patrick Swazey might look like, then I settled on building a foam flying wing with the goal of turning it into a uav someday. Some background:
I've never built anything like this before, nor flown an rc plane ever. In fact, when I finish this, i'm not going to admit I built it because rc planes are for nerds. When my friends found out I was driving a fiat 500 to work, I had to take the biggest guy in the company out to the parking lot and let him call it names for 15 minutes. To this day, they think I'm the kind of fellow who goes home and kicks back with a pug in his lap.
I hate pugs.
I like the Vought V-173, so I'm working in that direction, but in the mean time, i'm going to start with a nice flying vee NACA 0016, maybe 36". I also know dick all about radio control electronics, so help a brother out, won't you?
After battling a 4x8 sheet of 1.5" eps into the back of a fiat in the wind in -20 degrees C, I set to building a foam cutter. I used 6' of 1.5" ABS, some 20 gauge stainless wire and a laptop power supply (65W, 24V, 3.5A, don't ask me, all I know about electricity is that part of the electrician trade exam is chasing a millwright around a huge room with a bunch of ladders trying to set them up where they're as much in his way as possible, with master electrician status going to the man who can set a ladder up in a millwright's cheerios early in the morning before he even notices there's a goddamn electrician in his kitchen) on a dimmer switch. It cuts beautifully at the lowest dimmer setting, so tomorrow I'm going to draw up a non-tapering wing and cut some plywood templates to glue to the side of the foam to use as a guide for the wire. I have some initial questions:
Once I have 2 wings cut out and waiting to be joined and sparred, how do I align them on the horizontal plane to maximize the effect of the airfoil? Should they be twisted on the longest axis such that the bottom of the wing is parallel to the bench? Does this count as dihedral, and is it crucial to the success of an airfoil? Attached are pictures of the cutter, because, let's be honest, it's pretty sick. I will be putting more tension on the wire before using it on an actual wing.
