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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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'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👏👍
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!
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!
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!
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
2:46 [Edited because I realized what you were doing. My first suggestion is still good advice for an instance like 6:19 .]Just so you know, you can "offset" lines using the O key and it basically does this automatically. Though, it will be an offset which would mean that the lines would be moved upward or downward depending on which way the copy goes. To get around this, I normally make a line then offset on both sides of the original line. Then make the original line a construction line. Edit: Actually in this situation I would've done a rectangular pattern
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.
What if at the rear end of the wing we make a very small protrusion from below. Along the entire trailing edge of the wing, from below. And on the leading edge, the same only from above. For better looping of air around the wing. So that the air flow from below the wing, bumping into this small obstacle, is thrown down or away from it. even forward. In a rough representation of the cut of such a wing profile, this is the letter Z mirrored and laid on its side with a very long central element and small curved tips, up from the front down from the back to an arrow-shaped shape. If you throw a paper strip with such bends, it will always rotate in one direction I wonder how such a wing will curl?
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)
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.
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
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?
13:45 To make tiny cut gaps fuse better In PrusaSlicer there is a settings called "Slice gap closing radius: 0.049mm" it mean that it closes gaps smaller than 0.049mm which limits how small gaps you can make. In your design you use 0.1mm gaps which could be smaller if you decreased "gap closing radius" to maybe 0.005mm (don't remember might go even lower).
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
@@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!
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.
I actually experimented with LW-PLA and simply making the extruded wing profile a solid object, but made a hole for wing spar etc, and then just used 1 perimeter for the shell, and used "cubic" infill in PrusaSlicer. When you set the infill to 1 to 3%, it creates something very similar to the spar structure you modelled - and the spar hole automatically created a box inside the wing, and the cubic infill, while not as nice as a precisely designed one, still was doing a pretty good job with minimal effort, and the wing was remarkably light.
I think the only problem with that orientation of the wing profile is that the bend stress of the wing is at right angles to the layers. It's a bit like using wood across the grain instead of along the grain for bend strength. The layers pull apart more easily than the strength parallel to the layer planes. Putting the spars in is therefore important.
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...)
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.
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.
@@janivo5218 I tried it today and it works but the spiralize printed wing is hard to do in this version. Also the command I mean I named loft in English fusion 36p
@@srck4035 Nice, haven't had the time to do so myself but I'll probably try it in the coming week. I modified my Wing Design a bit already and will continue to do so to make it work
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.
Had a thought, not that it matters for light load usage such as RC. Could be used as a good demonstration of structures. You could aeroelastically tailor the wing by slight variations in rib angles and numbers. I like the nature behind aeroelastic tailoring because of the X-29's forward sweep where aeroelastic divergence was an issue and composite tailoring mitigated this. You could do the same here.
Hi Tom. Thank you thank you thank you. I'm an avid model plane builder and 3D printer. My electronic drafting skills are woeful😆 I've watched many tutorials and found them quite hard to follow. Even though you were going through the steps fast pause and rewind fix that. 👍👍👍
I think you may get better strength-to-weight if you make the circular cut-outs parallel to the ribs instead of parallel to the spar. And then they do unfortunately need to be tapered, so you might want to add the circular cutouts individually to a single rib before you replicate it.
Hi Tim. First congratulations for your channel and all your ideas. I really love following your crazy ideas and figuring out all the test and solution you go through.. great job. A question for this video. I want to 3d print a wing for my hydrofoil... the procedure you have showed is almost what I have in my mind except for the middle line that divide the ribs in two. Was used to print with a resin 3d printing so loops were not a problem. I have now a wiring printer but I'm actually not so familiar with it and all the tricks and problems of it. Let's go to the beef... I got your point and I agree on that regarding printing problems... what is not clear is how ribs can be working if you cat them in two... they look like jointed in the final job. 😳 . Not sure but maybe the space you left is just a little bit bigger that the noble so the ribs will be rejoined...but at this point I'm going to have a very small section that will represent a vulnerable point for all the structure..doesn't it? Ribs are done for make the whole structure more robust and at this point I'm scared to have a not sufficient robust ribs for my porpouse. What do you think. In advance...I'm planning to cover all the wing with a carbon fiber layer by the way
The gap between the ribs is about the same size as the printers nozzle (he mentioned this in the video) and the material used to print this structure foams up, which is why a "one line" printing style is needed, the ends just connect themselves as the actually printed line isn't 2D like it is in the software
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’m a noobe on Fusion 360 with a deep interest in RC airplanes. Thank you for making this video and for providing the Stl files. I would love to print your vtol plane with rotating wing as the fields here have clumpy grass that challenges any landing gear. Question: how can I tell if my 3d printer can print your design? Did I miss the overall dimensions at the start? (Lots of wings are designed to be printed a section at a time using slots and corresponding areas to link them together.) Yours is the first wing that hearkens back to the balsa models I started with 30-40 years ago. A well designed wing is like a practical art form combining form with function... this video reminds me of that aesthetic quality. Nicely done!
Have you tried over extruding, to see if the wing has better adhesion between the vase mode lines? I'm just wondering how the seam down the entire length of the wing will effect the rigidity of the wing.
Depending on what you're wanting to do with your geometry, you could just trim your ribs a little bit from the top surface rather than cutting them in half and then you'd have a completely smooth top of your wing and then have your ribs come up from the bottom of the wing and "kiss" the top skin. I think (check me on this) this would limit your ability to cut the through paths (circles in this video) but you'd get a smoother top wing surface.
@@TimStation yes you will get issues with the rib holes and main spar, i tray that and gave up on vase mode, now whit´s this video i can make my wing in vase mode.
the most ingenious idea is crisscrossing the ribs to make it possible to 3D print the entire wing as a single continuous path. I think this design probably make the wing so much stronger. Have you tested strength versus weight difference between the conventional wing construction and your design? My gut feel is that if you can 3D print the entire wing in a single print, you may not even need a central spar to transfer lift and weight of the plane.
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
Congratulations for this video, very explanatory. Is it possible to use the same technique for the fuselage? if you can you would make a video on this subject. Thank you
Tim, you can skip a step there and send the body directly to prusaslicer using the 3d Print option instead of exporting as .stl. You have to setup your slicer as the custom slicer first, but that is just pointing Fusion to the .exe of prusaslicer. No more export - import - export - import
Thanks Tom for the very ingenious use of Fusion 360 and the 3D printer. Can you show us the f3d file so I we can follow the Combine of various bodies, ie I keep getting outside only of my attempts to reproduce your procedures, yet your STL files prints flawlessly on my Prusa Printer.😀
Thanks for the video. You didn't show how smooth the wing came out with the 3D printing layer lines. How did it come out and how smooth does the wing look? I've got a 1/48th scale model that I'm thinking of reverse engineering into a 1/32 scale. They don't make this model any more, but I don't know how FDM printers would work and the SLA printers are not big enough.
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.
Would it be useful for this application to create custom G-Code processor that would make it so you wouldn't have to cut the ribs in half? I imagine the algorithm would do this by halving the extrusion height (ie by doubling the speed or halving feed) in spots where there would be a crossing? Would that work?
I’m still learning about 3D printers, I haven’t played with any FDM’s, but I do have a resin printer and I know they are very different machines. Ido however have a fairly good understanding of mechanical and structural engineering, and you have purposely designed a structurally weak assembly trying to create a workaround for your printer not using an optimum printing path. You built failure modes all the way through the wing section from leading edge to trailing edge. I believe the design would better if you had the skin print “separately” from the ribs. That is; skin, ribs, next layer, and so on. You don’t want a wing to split in half in flight due to weak bond of the halves. With the skin, rib method, if any bond is lost, it’s internal and may result in only a nominal increase in wing flex, but no crash. I would add a second spar to eliminate torsional stresses between the sections.
Buy some lightweight PLA and an FDM printer, print one out and then see. It's surprisingly strong as the crease lines (where the ribs start) are bonded together. They aren't failure modes at all. Lightweight PLA isn't going to survive a crash very well anyway, but so far it's performance in the air is excellent.
Hi Tim, can you adjust the width of a line in your 3D model during the printing process without necessarily making the object more complex. I would like to done it by adjusting the extrusion width or line width settings in 3D printer's slicing software, not by changing the model itself in the 3D modeling software.
Hello, congratulations for your video on this very complex subject, the vase mode. However you treat the case of a rectangular wing, but what about an elliptical wing? Is it possible? friendly
fusion 360 has a airfoil add-on can make airfoil sketch easier, and in the file menu we got a "3d print..." option that can direct import 3mf to slicer
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
There's also one called airfoil dat to spline
You can also just import an airfoil as a svg file.
I love that you share your methodology so freely for us to Follow. Thank you!!!
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.
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
Took me 3 days to figure out a simple shelf. I felt like a moron :)
Spiral mode itself is so satisfying. But your design for spiral mode is just gorgeous. Love it
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)
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.
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 should know by now that there are many ways to skin a cat in 3D.
@@piconano Thats why he said "FYI".
@@Festivejelly FYI "FYI can also be expressed as For Your Info"
better yet just do a thin-extrude
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
Man Tim needs to meet Tom! Imagine the ideas they could create.
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.
Tim Station > Tom Stanton
Thought I woke up into an alternate universe for a moment when I saw the notification.
NGL, you can tell Tim is way smarter. No wonder he changed his name.
Actually Tim station = Tom stanton • i^2 / on
Turbo voile ( jaques Yves Cousteau)c est cool il faudrait que tu regardes sa fabrication si c est possible
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.
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!
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!
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.
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
Excellent tutorial and excellent process you've developed to create light and strong 3d printed airfoils!
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👏👍
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!
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!
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!
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.
Agreed. It’s important to note there is no fill in the print. Surface only.
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
@@kaboom-zf2bl Is there a tool that does these stress tests for free? All I know of are expensive or severly limited...
@@mafiosomax7423 autocad has it as an addon it is part of the virtual testing lab with fusion 360 ...
I've been thinking for a very long time how to do this, you opened my eyes.
You're awesome, good luck to you!
Greetings from Kazakhstan!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
White paint/reflective duct tape.
He handled that topic in his main channel half a year ago already :)
@@matthewgeiger7705 Why would you buy reflective tape or white spray paint just to make a black 3D print white? Just buy white filament.
@@PunakiviAddikti if you already bought black filament and don’t want to spend another 20$ on more materials it’s a cheaper option.
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
Wow, what a tour 😍
Impressive build for a wase mode print!
Thanks for sharing your expirence with all of us 👍 😀
As someone who uses rhino pretty much exclusively for modelling, parametric programs blow my mind when used like this!
Super useful and very well explained, thanks Tim and also to your twin brother Tom 👍
Very cool to see how you did this. More complicated than I suspected but it makes sense after watching your video, nicely done! Cheers
2:46 [Edited because I realized what you were doing. My first suggestion is still good advice for an instance like 6:19 .]Just so you know, you can "offset" lines using the O key and it basically does this automatically. Though, it will be an offset which would mean that the lines would be moved upward or downward depending on which way the copy goes. To get around this, I normally make a line then offset on both sides of the original line. Then make the original line a construction line.
Edit: Actually in this situation I would've done a rectangular pattern
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.
So clever! Easy when you know how to do it! Thanks for doing the hard part and sharing it!
This is a REALLY straight forward presentation of a How-to in Fusion 360. Might just get me past a design hurdle. Then - Watchout world! Thanks Tom
Thanks for this tutorial. You change my life in 3d printing with big nozzle
What if at the rear end of the wing we make a very small protrusion from below. Along the entire trailing edge of the wing, from below. And on the leading edge, the same only from above. For better looping of air around the wing. So that the air flow from below the wing, bumping into this small obstacle, is thrown down or away from it. even forward. In a rough representation of the cut of such a wing profile, this is the letter Z mirrored and laid on its side with a very long central element and small curved tips, up from the front down from the back to an arrow-shaped shape. If you throw a paper strip with such bends, it will always rotate in one direction I wonder how such a wing will curl?
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)
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.
Thanks for walking us through the f360 steps. There's a lot that can be learned here.
I knew about all the steps but the spar section cad steps were new to me. Thx for sharing.
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
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?
I think you became a reference in how to design a wing to print in LW-PLA. Concratulation tom
Really you spent a lot to share us such techniques, at least we should say thank you very much.
Go ahead bro good luck
Thanks for this perfect video. It saved me almost three weeks to figure it out myself ;-)
13:45 To make tiny cut gaps fuse better In PrusaSlicer there is a settings called "Slice gap closing radius: 0.049mm" it mean that it closes gaps smaller than 0.049mm which limits how small gaps you can make. In your design you use 0.1mm gaps which could be smaller if you decreased "gap closing radius" to maybe 0.005mm (don't remember might go even lower).
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
Hi Tim! I have printed your airfoil and I made a test run. The airflow is impressive!
For Bambu users, every time he uses 0.1mm spacing, try 0.15mm. I've found the Bambu slicer has some trouble understanding 0.1mm gaps in vase mode.
This is perfect timing! I'm working on designing my first model for printing, this helps a ton!
tip: make more use of feature patterns, much better than sketch patterns
@@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!
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.
I actually experimented with LW-PLA and simply making the extruded wing profile a solid object, but made a hole for wing spar etc, and then just used 1 perimeter for the shell, and used "cubic" infill in PrusaSlicer. When you set the infill to 1 to 3%, it creates something very similar to the spar structure you modelled - and the spar hole automatically created a box inside the wing, and the cubic infill, while not as nice as a precisely designed one, still was doing a pretty good job with minimal effort, and the wing was remarkably light.
Thank you a lot, I've been thinking a while how to design a wing and your method really liked me.
I think the only problem with that orientation of the wing profile is that the bend stress of the wing is at right angles to the layers. It's a bit like using wood across the grain instead of along the grain for bend strength. The layers pull apart more easily than the strength parallel to the layer planes. Putting the spars in is therefore important.
This is really useful I can already tell I'm going to need this at some point for printing
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...)
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.
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.
Fusion 360 has a new extrude function where you can extrude solid from a line.... This should make it even more stable in cad to design the wing
You read my mind by making this video. Thanks! Love it!
Thanks! This will help me design my UAV wing. The slicer infill is terrible.
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.
Very nice print, how would you do this for angled wing designs? is there a way to make the wing itself a pattern and extrude it in a circular way?
Base rip and smaller endrip. Instead of extrude you use lift up
@@srck4035 Alright I'll check that out, thank you very much
@@janivo5218 I tried it today and it works but the spiralize printed wing is hard to do in this version. Also the command I mean I named loft in English fusion 36p
@@srck4035 Nice, haven't had the time to do so myself but I'll probably try it in the coming week. I modified my Wing Design a bit already and will continue to do so to make it work
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.
I was very interested about the process when I saw your last video.
Thank you for showing how to do this. You saved me a lot of time.
Had a thought, not that it matters for light load usage such as RC. Could be used as a good demonstration of structures.
You could aeroelastically tailor the wing by slight variations in rib angles and numbers. I like the nature behind aeroelastic tailoring because of the X-29's forward sweep where aeroelastic divergence was an issue and composite tailoring mitigated this. You could do the same here.
Hi Tom. Thank you thank you thank you. I'm an avid model plane builder and 3D printer. My electronic drafting skills are woeful😆 I've watched many tutorials and found them quite hard to follow. Even though you were going through the steps fast pause and rewind fix that. 👍👍👍
I think you may get better strength-to-weight if you make the circular cut-outs parallel to the ribs instead of parallel to the spar. And then they do unfortunately need to be tapered, so you might want to add the circular cutouts individually to a single rib before you replicate it.
thanks tom this solves so many issues for me you have no idea!
This is a video I'm going to save in my favorites so that when youtube makes Portuguese dubbing available, I can watch it.
Hi Tim. First congratulations for your channel and all your ideas. I really love following your crazy ideas and figuring out all the test and solution you go through.. great job. A question for this video. I want to 3d print a wing for my hydrofoil... the procedure you have showed is almost what I have in my mind except for the middle line that divide the ribs in two. Was used to print with a resin 3d printing so loops were not a problem. I have now a wiring printer but I'm actually not so familiar with it and all the tricks and problems of it. Let's go to the beef... I got your point and I agree on that regarding printing problems... what is not clear is how ribs can be working if you cat them in two... they look like jointed in the final job. 😳 . Not sure but maybe the space you left is just a little bit bigger that the noble so the ribs will be rejoined...but at this point I'm going to have a very small section that will represent a vulnerable point for all the structure..doesn't it? Ribs are done for make the whole structure more robust and at this point I'm scared to have a not sufficient robust ribs for my porpouse. What do you think. In advance...I'm planning to cover all the wing with a carbon fiber layer by the way
The gap between the ribs is about the same size as the printers nozzle (he mentioned this in the video) and the material used to print this structure foams up, which is why a "one line" printing style is needed, the ends just connect themselves as the actually printed line isn't 2D like it is in the software
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 followed every single steps, but when i combined the parts, it created a lot of single peaces of the wing
Same as me...
up
Woww! You did it exactly as i was working on a UAV a few years ago!
I’m a noobe on Fusion 360 with a deep interest in RC airplanes. Thank you for making this video and for providing the Stl files. I would love to print your vtol plane with rotating wing as the fields here have clumpy grass that challenges any landing gear. Question: how can I tell if my 3d printer can print your design? Did I miss the overall dimensions at the start? (Lots of wings are designed to be printed a section at a time using slots and corresponding areas to link them together.)
Yours is the first wing that hearkens back to the balsa models I started with 30-40 years ago. A well designed wing is like a practical art form combining form with function... this video reminds me of that aesthetic quality. Nicely done!
Have you tried over extruding, to see if the wing has better adhesion between the vase mode lines? I'm just wondering how the seam down the entire length of the wing will effect the rigidity of the wing.
I suspect that the foaming of the light weight PLA is doing the work of over extrusion.
Depending on what you're wanting to do with your geometry, you could just trim your ribs a little bit from the top surface rather than cutting them in half and then you'd have a completely smooth top of your wing and then have your ribs come up from the bottom of the wing and "kiss" the top skin. I think (check me on this) this would limit your ability to cut the through paths (circles in this video) but you'd get a smoother top wing surface.
Correct, but as you mention, it causes issues with the rib holes
@@TimStation yes you will get issues with the rib holes and main spar, i tray that and gave up on vase mode, now whit´s this video i can make my wing in vase mode.
the most ingenious idea is crisscrossing the ribs to make it possible to 3D print the entire wing as a single continuous path. I think this design probably make the wing so much stronger. Have you tested strength versus weight difference between the conventional wing construction and your design? My gut feel is that if you can 3D print the entire wing in a single print, you may not even need a central spar to transfer lift and weight of the plane.
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
Congratulations for this video, very explanatory.
Is it possible to use the same technique for the fuselage? if you can you would make a video on this subject.
Thank you
Tim, you can skip a step there and send the body directly to prusaslicer using the 3d Print option instead of exporting as .stl. You have to setup your slicer as the custom slicer first, but that is just pointing Fusion to the .exe of prusaslicer. No more export - import - export - import
man as flight instructor this is really cool, i gotta print this
Effin genius. Love this concept.
I wish there would be more explanation why you have to have the cuts in the wing to get a continuous print!?
Thanks Tom for the very ingenious use of Fusion 360 and the 3D printer. Can you show us the f3d file so I we can follow the Combine of various bodies, ie I keep getting outside only of my attempts to reproduce your procedures, yet your STL files prints flawlessly on my Prusa Printer.😀
Nevermind, found my mistake - works as advertised. Thanks for sharing!
Great video, but I have to ask.. why the lines outside of the wing spar? Wouldn't a circular hole for a carbon fibre rod be sufficient?
"Just winging it" Ha! It *does* look pretty cool! Great tutorial! (Now to try to do the same in FreeCAD...😖)
Thanks for the video. You didn't show how smooth the wing came out with the 3D printing layer lines. How did it come out and how smooth does the wing look?
I've got a 1/48th scale model that I'm thinking of reverse engineering into a 1/32 scale. They don't make this model any more, but I don't know how FDM printers would work and the SLA printers are not big enough.
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.
Would it be useful for this application to create custom G-Code processor that would make it so you wouldn't have to cut the ribs in half? I imagine the algorithm would do this by halving the extrusion height (ie by doubling the speed or halving feed) in spots where there would be a crossing? Would that work?
I’m still learning about 3D printers, I haven’t played with any FDM’s, but I do have a resin printer and I know they are very different machines. Ido however have a fairly good understanding of mechanical and structural engineering, and you have purposely designed a structurally weak assembly trying to create a workaround for your printer not using an optimum printing path. You built failure modes all the way through the wing section from leading edge to trailing edge. I believe the design would better if you had the skin print “separately” from the ribs. That is; skin, ribs, next layer, and so on. You don’t want a wing to split in half in flight due to weak bond of the halves. With the skin, rib method, if any bond is lost, it’s internal and may result in only a nominal increase in wing flex, but no crash.
I would add a second spar to eliminate torsional stresses between the sections.
Buy some lightweight PLA and an FDM printer, print one out and then see. It's surprisingly strong as the crease lines (where the ribs start) are bonded together. They aren't failure modes at all. Lightweight PLA isn't going to survive a crash very well anyway, but so far it's performance in the air is excellent.
It seems like you could modify your slicer settings to have the outer most perimeter continuous and not have to split the ribs in half....
Hi Tim, can you adjust the width of a line in your 3D model during the printing process without necessarily making the object more complex. I would like to done it by adjusting the extrusion width or line width settings in 3D printer's slicing software, not by changing the model itself in the 3D modeling software.
How do I do this but for a fuselage? Where the ribs don't connect. Like in your VTOL video
Hello, congratulations for your video on this very complex subject, the vase mode. However you treat the case of a rectangular wing, but what about an elliptical wing? Is it possible?
friendly
fusion 360 has a airfoil add-on can make airfoil sketch easier, and in the file menu we got a "3d print..." option that can direct import 3mf to slicer