Hello all,
I recently received a question regarding my design for my Skywalker VTOL design, so I made this post to outline my design and some tips that I have for those interested in implementing it. The original design idea came from Sander Smeets: http://px4.io/portfolio/quadranger-vtol/
Here are a few pictures of the bottoms of my wings:
The design specifications are here:
Booms:
- Carbon Fibre Square Tube 15 X 15 X 500mm
- Aluminum Square Tube DIY Multi-Rotor 12.8x12.8x230mm (.5Inch) (Silver)
Plate:
- Carbon Fiber Sheet 1.5mm300mm150mm
Motor Mounts:
- 6mm Shaft Universal Motor Mount
- Screw Socket Head Hex M4x45mm
- Hex locknuts M4 10pc
Motors:
- Turnigy Aerodrive SK3 - 3548-840kv Brushless Outrunner Motor
Propellers:
- 14x4.7SF
ESCs:
- TURNIGY Plush 60amp Speed Controller w/BEC
Design:
- Cut the Aluminum tubes into halves and use each piece to glue the carbon fiber tubes together.
- Attach the plate to the wing
- The front edge of the plate is 7.25 inches from the front of the wing
- With the X8 wing, I personally used a dremel and leveled out the wing so that it would sit flush with the wing. Rather than having edges lifted.
- Tip: Take the small wing joiner pieces off of the wing joiner prior to gluing to avoid gluing the small piece and the wing joiner together. (Yes I have done this before, and no, it is not fun to take them off.)
- Attach the booms to the wing plate
- The center of the boom is located 0.75" above the front of the plate.
- Tip: This is something that I did to ensure that I glued the booms onto the plate square. Take an old shoe box and cut the lid off of the box. Once you have them in two pieces, use the box portion and tape this onto the plate with the edge lined up square and at the distance which you will glue on the boom. When this is taped set the boom onto the plate flush with the box. Then, with the top of the box which you just cut off, line this up against the edge of the boom to guarantee that you have the correct width. This makes it much easier to glue on than drawing lines into the plate and then worrying about gluing the boom onto that exact spot. This way, you can simply put the glue into the gap made by the two parts of the shoe box, and attach the boom.
- Once the boom has dried, attach the motors
- With the motor mounts and motors specified above, it will be necessary for you to drill new holes into the mount as the pre-drilled holes will not fit with the mount with comes with the motors.
Side Notes:
- The Battery Setup which I use is two 4S 5000 mAh batteries with 35C discharge attached in parallel ONLY for the vertical take off and landing. I have a separate battery for forward flight. I will be testing smaller batteries in the future as recommended by the mad genius Darrell Burkey.
- I personally extended the motor wires on the ESCs rather than the power wires. I have heard people say positives and negatives of both methods, such as that extending the motor wires can result in differences in timing and distortion of signal, and in regards to extending the power wires, there can be a voltage drop over the distance. I have not had any issues extending the motor wires.
- DO NOT cut holes into the booms to run your wires through. While it may be more aesthetic, those will be the first places to break on impact. Simply tie the wires on with zip ties.
- At the time of writing this, I forgot to measure the distance between the wing joiner and the inside edge of the boom, I will update that soon.
- If you have any questions, feel free to let me know!