3D-printed helicopter blades

A perfect combination of my twin passions, 3D printing and copters! From Hackaday:

If you’re like us, you’ve been infatuated with the small RC helicopter you picked up on Amazon up until the point where it careened off a wall and broke its blades. Now that you’re wondering about what to do with that small pile of plastic, metal, and electronics, why not print some helicopter blades on your 3D printer?

[Taylor] printed these blades on his Utilimaker, but we don’t see why they couldn’t be printed on a Makerbot or other RepRap. The first set of printed blades worked on the top rotor, but they were too heavy when all four blades were replace. The parts were edited in netfabb using a 0.08mm layer height and now they’re working perfectly. As far as free tools go, Slic3r is the new hotness for .STL to Gcode conversion and now that [Taylor] put the files up on Thingiverse, anyone can print a set of spare blades.

Traditional 3D printing methods don't really work with carbon fiber. You could try printing with glass-reinforced plastics - they have tiny chopped up bits of fiberglass in them and it strengthens them a lot. For example, the housing on a Dremel is 33% glass filled nylon. But if you tried to do something like, say, create a strand of plastic for printing that contained one long strand of carbon fiber, it wouldn't really work. The print head needs to be able to easily break the plastic stream for jumping between locations.

You could, however, 3D print molds for carbon fiber, and then use traditional carbon fiber laying techniques to create the blades. So 3D printing can still be useful for making carbon fiber stuff like this. Its just not as simple as 3D printing direct.

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Comments

tlalexander February 2, 2012 at 4:44pm

Traditional 3D printing methods don't really work with carbon fiber. You could try printing with glass-reinforced plastics - they have tiny chopped up bits of fiberglass in them and it strengthens them a lot. For example, the housing on a Dremel is 33% glass filled nylon. But if you tried to do something like, say, create a strand of plastic for printing that contained one long strand of carbon fiber, it wouldn't really work. The print head needs to be able to easily break the plastic stream for jumping between locations.

You could, however, 3D print molds for carbon fiber, and then use traditional carbon fiber laying techniques to create the blades. So 3D printing can still be useful for making carbon fiber stuff like this. Its just not as simple as 3D printing direct.
Brad Smith February 2, 2012 at 7:06am

could we add carbon fiber to the process ?
tlalexander January 25, 2012 at 11:39am

Glad you guys like my blades! Im gonna get a bladr mSR X and try printing parts for a real heli next. Or maybe my 450 Big Lama. :-)
Anish January 24, 2012 at 2:11am

@chris would be truly impressed if they come out balanced :)
Ellison Chan January 23, 2012 at 5:48pm

Not too bad. Almost as good as the SLS, 0.7mm resolution. But the nylon used on the SLS printers is slightly more flexible, so the blades would hold up a little better.

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