Posts

Showing posts from May, 2020

V-22 Osprey Project - Nearing Takeoff

Image
After going back and redesigning the wing to use two servos instead of one, I was very pleased with the results.  I was able to salvage the right wing that was built for one servo and modify it to the new design without scrapping it. Satisfied that the dual-servo design would work, I sheeted the wing with veneer and began construction of the left wing. Before sheeting the left wing I setup the digital servos to mirror each other and used a digital angle meter to set the 90 degree end stops of the servos. I completed the sheeting of the left wing and then moved on to designing the foam board fuselage.  I'm not satisfied with designing foamboard bends in Fusion 360.  The final result admittedly left inaccurate A & B folds with lots of trimming and fiddling to get a usable result, but it should function: The lower section that houses the landing gear on the scale craft has a complicated shape as it curves up to the fuselage in the rear.  Instead of trying to bend foamboard to the

V-22 Osprey Project - A Few Steps Forward and Major Design Flaw

Image
With the Coronavirus shutting down everything since my last post, I've made significant progress on the V-22 project.  After the last post, I created a foamboard profile of the Osprey and was able to hover the craft around the yard successfully. With basic hovering out of the way, I started fine-tuning the CAD drawings for the tilt mechanism.  Other folks have used multiple servos to control the tilt of VTOL motors.  Tom Stanton used a gearing mechanism with a servo at each wing-tip to rotate the props on his fixed-pitch VTOL.  The folks at Rotormast used a custom servo at each wingtip to operate a rack and pinion system.  The servo was modified to use an external potentiometer.  There is a gear on the rotation shaft that actuates the potentiometer through the 90-degree travel while the servo's rack and pinion system can gain additional torque through several rotations.  I didn't have sufficiently strong servos on hand to handle the torque required to rotate t