0:36 At the beginning you seem to manually draw out the wing profile. In Fusion 360 and Onshape, there are addons that will automatically draw them out for you. In Fusion the addon is called "Airfoil Generator". The Onshape one is created by Darren Lynch
I have used the plugin you have mentioned. It's great! I remember having trouble specifying the chord length. It's like normalized to 1 or something odd.
@@jreed1701d typically airfoil files are from 0 to 1 w/ 1 being the TE. Not familiar with the plugins, but you could import the curve and as long as you have the correct unit system set you can scale the whole thing by your desired chord
Yes!! Lovely. I always wondered how you did this, it seems like magic to me. Sure I can design a maze for a mouse, a thread adapter, etc, but the engineering for a wing? Amazing. Plus the added complexity that vase mode can bring.
I'm glad you mentioned the time it took to work it out. The next chap would do the maths, adjust for inflation, and charge a fee for what we all just got for a click. Good on yer mate👏👍
Thanks for sharing your workflow! There may be other ways to get to the result you've achieved, or perhaps that's what those 3 weeks were for, but I always enjoy watching someone cadd who knows what they're doing.
Thank you for stating just how long this took you. When I saw this I originally thought “there’s no way I could do anything like that” even though I’m experienced in F360. When you said it took several weeks it restored my confidence that given enough time I could come up with solutions like this. Often a creator will skip over just how much time it took to get to a solution
Thank you for the guide. I gives us a very good insight in the process. I'm always humbled by your creativity. Btw, you don't need to remove the combine step. You can move the current marker in history graph to place before the combine step and add what you need. When you move the marker back to the end you will have combine step amended by the cutouts (around 10:30)
I had been trying to copy your work here and spent all evening trying to find a tutorial on how to do this only dimly remembering this video, and this video is one of the best tutorials on this technique.
Thank you very much for this guide, excellent write up on the description to hack the vase mode. I had to rewatch the "combine tool" use a couple of times to find out that you are in fact cutting the ribs from the main body.. Now i understand the process!
Dude thank you so much for this. I am an EE so making the wing ribs was breaking my brain how you design them. Holy cow this opens up so many options for me. For tons of stuff not just planes.
Thank you very much for this tutorial! Really, really nice! This will save me a lot of time, because after I saw your video on the VTOL, I knew I want to design an airplane with such a wing myself.
Quick note: when 3D printing a wing, *use white filament!* Black filament will absorb so much sunlight that it'll make PLA and foam soft enough to cause sagging or even structural failure.
If you don't mind the added weight. If that roll of filament is the only one you are ever going to buy, I understand your argument. Who the fuck has 20 dollars just laying around in their pockets? By the way, if you swap out that electrical motor with a rubber band, you might afford to fly it too.@@matthewgeiger7705
Awesome to see you have made a video on this! I was very curious myself what kind of little tricks you employed, but it makes a lot of sense seeing how its done.
Huge thanks for sharing your time and knowledge so clearly. I have an Eclipson RC plane and always wondered how they designed the lightweight structure with very little stringing and I think you have solved the mystery for me!! Having followed your really excellent guidance with Fusion I managed to produced a 200mm test piece with excellent results. Instead of slicing the ribs at the mid point, I used offset to slice 0.8mm from the top of the ribs just under the surface of the top wing skin, that way the top surface of the wing prints perfectly and the "joins" for the 2 layers are on the under surface. Using PRUSA slicer settings from LW PLA, similar to those from 3DLabprint the results are very clean fast light weight prints (not using spiral mode). If you optimise the gap, and print settings the ribs connect nicely to the top skin as material foams... brilliant. Would echo some comments about Airfoil generator but thats not the point of your video. Next project (after the light weight "test" glider") with my 11year old son is to replicate his Balsa/Monocote RC Fokker DR1 in LW PLA. Tom, your videos are always informative... my son is always watching and says wants to become an engineer one day...so you are also inspiring the next generation... many thanks for the great content!
This is clever. You end up with a solid model but only for the surfaces. I would struggle as I want the cad model to be of the geometry that I wanted, but that is not exactly what you have here. Very clever. Well done and thanks for sharing.
for his use he doesnt actually need individual ribs just enough "meat" inside to keep them stiff and not let them fold up .... I was hoping before he lightened the wing with the holes he would have done a quick stress analysis and then just cut out the low stress sections and leave the high stress ones ... . yes this is a small plane and model ... BUT ... if he does the stress test ... he then can not only build the small model but make it a true plane and not have to worry about the wings smacking him in the head as they fold up in flight
You Monster! Just went trough it as a total newbie in Fusion 360, sliced it in Cura and it turned out very clean. But it's hard to comprehend how it's possible for a person to imagine it and then make it in working design. Incredible, my compliments!
Oh, very nice job. I'm a fan of B. Wallice and his geodetic aircraft construction - Vickers Wellington. I'm glad that a similar solution is still alive. I wish you much success.
Having experimented with surface/vase mode for model aircraft wings myself I viewed your video with interest. I use TurboCad and therefore had to adapt your Fusion 360 method accordingly to achieve the same model results, but it was very much worth the effort. The model prints just as you describe, brilliant. I can see why it took you three weeks to work the process out, and even now I struggle with the logic to work in the "negative" to achieve the correct "positive" print result with Surface printing. Also avoiding double (overprinting) print lines and stop/start printing. "simple when you know". Thank you
Awesome, I was hoping you would make a video like this. Really informative. FYI you can use the "offset" tool to make these thin shapes (e.g. 13:49) and the whole thing you could have created surface extrusions and used the "thickness" tool to make it a 0.1mm solid body.
You are always genious. No matter whether Tim or Tom. Saw you first with your magnetic coil gun years ago. But what I didn't get here is that the airfoil can be printed without supports.
There are good airfoil generator Plugins for F360 to import an Airfoil form an .dat file so you have it as some nice splines. I Printed some wings with a similar method, and printed the same segment with gyroid infill, and the gyroid was way lighter but the strength was very lackluster as a lot of the lw-pla in the infill was not boned correctly together. Will retry to make my wing with some stuff i learned form this video. Great content!
I realize the work that went into this vid means you started before we requested a guide, but I'd like to think that me asking for one is why you made this. Thanks for the guide!
i spent ALL DAY yesterday trying to reverse engineer and figure out how you model these things i had no idea this video existed oml where was this when i needed it most
I think there's a bit to be done in terms of optimizing your CAD workflow and making it more amenable for parameterization but this is a really exciting design. Looking forwards to playing around with this! I wonder how much of a pain it would be to have varying aerofoil profiles over the length of the wing, and to consider how chunks of wing can include tabs/slots to help them mate together. Brilliant work as always, Tom.
considering the way he did it ... a multi chord wing would be done the same way but would add another body for each different chord of the wing profile ... the fill would still work as one of its constraints is INSIDE the outer surface
As an old RC plane guy- balsa with plastic heat shrink covering. Extremely light and strong. Also durable as long as you don’t crash it. All the 3d printed and foam built stuff I see are all extremely heavy with poor structural strength. I feel like the opportunity to mix 3d printed traditional rib structure with traditional style build. Carbon spars, 3d printed ribs, carbon leading edge spar, trailing edge, could even use balsa sheeting on the front section of the foil/wing in a traditional manner. Cover with monokote or similar. You get a incredibly strong and light wing👍. I feel like it would be possible to shed nearly 1/2 the structural weight of some of the best 100% printed wings I have seen while having far higher structural strength. Granted this adds traditional assembly back into the mix but the results of mixing the best of all the materials has high potential for some incredible weight to strength possibilities. All translating to superior flight characteristics, flight time, durability ie air frame life etc. I would fly my old school balsa gas planes for 2-3 yrs nearly every weekend before the vibration from the engine started to cause structural failure in the tail section. Classic failure of an old RC plane with lots of flight hours was the loss of a horizontal flight control on the tail due to structural failure.
Interesting. I was amazed how thin your rib pattern is! I am used to SLA printing, so it is interesting to see how you adapt the structure to an additive process.
Hello, I wanted to ask how you printed the wing in parts, let's say the wing is too tall. Do you divide the wing by small cuts and print each individually? would it cause problems if the next section of wing technically doesn't have a flat face at the bottom when it starts printing, and if there are specific settings. Also would this technique of the one line cause problems if I needed support material where I have a square slot on each side of the wing, meaning I have a ceiling due to the slot? If anyone knows, it would be a great help. Thanks.
@@MichielvanderMeulen yeah the pattern part is still a bit confusing for me, as this was my first transition from solidworks to fusion - it seems like magic. I will definitely check it out more! thanks!
Hi Tim. Although your rib-slicing technique seems a good idea to get a smooth surface, for the size of wing and low speed of the vehicle you're talking about, and the resulting small Re-Number, it would actually be overall much better to leave the ribs whole so they form a proper, continuous torsion box between top and bottom skin, and accept the small imperfections on the surface. In many slicers these days you can define the seam location on the perimeter and this would have been a much better way of avoiding having them in the wrong places. As soon as they're behind the transition to turbulent flow all is well and you wouldn't notice any difference. Your wing will be *much* stronger, and thus potentially lighter, then with the sliced ribs. Also, next time have a look at using NURBS curves rather than arc segments in the initial sketch. This way you have much better control over the geometry, and avoid the curvature discontinuity between the constant curvature arc segments. Other than that good content with great tips for beginning wing designers.
The Problem her is that the wing is designed to work without Retraction of the extruder. When you print lw-pla you should not have any retractions in your design becaus that will clog up the hotend. If this were to be printed with any other Material than you'd definitely be right
Hey Tom, so to make your life a little easier, there is LW PLA by Polymaker. It is different from the foaming stuff by colorfabb or eSun as it is basically "pre-foamed" . It has very low density and prints like regular PLA. It maybe a touch heavier than foaming stuff, but for your new project where you teased even a canopy/nose with similar structure to the wing, it maybe easier to work with. And it is cheaper than every foaming pla i could find (at least where I live)
Brilliant so far 🙂 How would you optimise the design with FEA (finite element analysis) to minimise the amount of printed material and still retain sufficient strength?
I think I know how Dennis must have felt when he stole the embryos in Jurassic Park..... Thanks for sharing this and saving me months of time (if I ever would have arrived here at all...)
Nice job ! By offseting the extrados of the ribs by 0.5mm right before the "Combine" feature, I obtain a clean extrados. By that I mean that the extruder draws the extrados in one smooth line and on the intrados, it draws the ribs and supports. This helps for the aerodynamics because the extrados is smoother.
Looking at the wing i thought it would be a lot more complicated, i am not surprised it took you 3 weeks to find out. Its an interesting method for sure and might be useful for other projects too
This wing design is better than your original with the addition of a spar however it doesnt solve the issue that the wing half columns never actually meet and fuse making the wing weak to torsional loads along the chord. That said its still a great lightweight design, thank you Tim
Great work. You show us how to do it, but, I am still bending my brain why this works so well with the spiral mode of the 3D printer. I guess I just have to try it out.
In the future I would love to see you use the shape optimization tool. I am doing some research and am using that tool to generate my rib shapes based on surface pressures.
Thats really interesting and thanks for sharing the design process. Do you glue 200mm long sections together to make the full wingspan and did you design any specific features into the surfaces to ensure a good fit between each section?
I call this the "continuous path vase mode hack". You see it around, but it is quite rare. I'm not into planes, but I've used this method when the design time is justified and I want to print many multiples of something that prints fast and is strong. Shelf brackets, table legs, rugged custom containers, etc. Have you thought of using a belt printer? The 45 degree print geometry lets you print fully-enclosed shapes in vase mode (all 6 sides of a cube, for example). The ability to print long wings in one piece might be useful. I notice that your ribs are basically 2 perimeters pressed together flat like a ribbon. Have you considered separating those 2 lines to create a tubular structure and (maybe) more rigidity?
Only one thing for reasoning. Your printing time is 8 hours. In the company I'am working, we make wings like yours. We were making it like you by 3d printing, but it was very long for us. Now we are making it from flat plates and just a paper as a shell. All parts are being cut by laser cut and now it takes us only 5 minutes to make 1 wing including cutting and assemble. So, try to use laser cutting, it's very useful to save you time.
I have used Blender to basically hand drawn similar structure using 3d faces. The model has zero volume but in spiral print mode the edge is printed correctly and you can design the exact print path yourself. I hope this helps someone.
You're great TOM! Thanks. I'm still trying to understand how the hell it can possibly be a vase mode spiralyzed print. One day or the other i'll try to print some sort of aeroplane this way or maybe a blimp.
Thank you for an excellent guide to create these wings! As a tutorial video, would you be able to highlight the shortcuts and hotkeys that you've used, spoken or written?
