3D Printing

All very amazing. Have you got an image and wing span of the plane you building. If it is a wing I will be even more interested.

This is it?

Hi Brian
Yes resin has come along way . Very strong and the finish is outstanding quality. We use one at work for various design concepts. The resin still needs to come down in price but what you don’t use from the resin bath you can use again. You do have to clean the bath every time .

This is it Phil, the Eclipson EBW 160. There's another version, designed for FPV. It has all the whistles and bells for that particular discipline. Today, I downloaded the plan from Eclipson, the latest version has fins, they weren't on my download, so it must be a recent addition to the design. The wing reminds me of the Horten wings of WW2, they didn't have any vertical surfaces. I think that stability in the yaw axis is achieved by using lots of washout at the wing tips. As to whether it flies as well as they say it does remains to be seen. I have all the parts printed, but so far, HobbyKing haven't sent the glue I ordered a week ago, so I can't actually put the darned thing together.

Thanks for the info Alan, is there any flexibility in resin printing? Can you select a colour or mechanical spec for the print?

Yes Brian. As with our printers you can do the same and even more. Also a good selection of resin colours available but changing colour means washing the bath out every time.

Since my last entry back in August, my wife and I have been away. Since we came home I've done very little, apart from try to fire up some enthusiasm to finish printing the parts for the Blackwing. I checked the parts already made, and found that two months in a box hadn't improved things. The joint faces between the large sections in the centre of the wing are no longer flat and straight, and will need a bit of sanding to get a decent joint. Perhaps its a good thing that I didn't glue it together as soon as the parts came off the printer. The stress causing the distortion would have put a lot of extra load on the assorted joints, and most likely there would have been an in-flight failure at some point. Since I saw a couple of videos of the LabPrint Mig 15, I have been wondering whether printing a model is really all that its cracked up to be. One Mig didn't cope at all well with windy conditions on landing, and ended up severely damaged, when a conventional model would have shrugged off the "firm" arrival. The other video showed a Mig in flight, it wasn't flying fast. and it wasn't pulling a high "G" manoeuvre, it just shed a wing and broke up in the air on a conventional low fly past. So far I haven't found the glue that's used by the people that publish the designs. Watching the time lapse videos of various builds shows that the joints are literally swamped with glue, this is something that I thought more or less stopped the glue from curing, however the makers seem to spray on a great deal of "kicker" and even add more glue to the assembled joints. Using liberal amounts of cyano and kicker in a conventional shed would be impossible to tolerate unless a really good extractor fan was used. That would ensure that all the fumes and any warm air would be drawn out, the resulting icy draught would be uncomfortable to say the least, so assembling a model in the winter is going to be rather difficult. I don't think that epoxy or two pack acrylic would be practical due to the difficulty of mixing small amounts accurately, in any case, if those glues were practical, I think they'd be suggested in the build manuals. The last attempt at gluing wing sections together, I tried Loctite Power Flex super glue. This is a flexible glue, and I thought it would compensate for the movement of the rather flimsy sections. Its a gel glue and I used a series of "dots" instead of a continuous line, and I didn't use any accelerator. Although I had a fan for the fumes, I ended up with sore eyes and a runny nose for a day or so afterwards, and that was only a trial joint. I think perhaps printed aeroplanes might not be the best way for me, and I regret getting rid of all my balsa sheet, strip and plywood. Perhaps I'll be able to find something from Motion RC that appeals, their little EDF Mig 15 flew very well, but only for about half a minute before I completely lost it, however it may still fly again, a little shorter in the nose and more wrinkles than the average tortoise, at least it doesn't need cyano to hold it together.