How I Designed a 3D Printed Wing

[Thee_Snow_Wolf]

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

[jschulz]

I love that you share your methodology so freely for us to Follow. Thank you!!!

[enb]

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.

[mannythehunter]

Man Tim needs to meet Tom! Imagine the ideas they could create.

[lovecastle]

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

[SciDIY]

Spiral mode itself is so satisfying. But your design for spiral mode is just gorgeous. Love it

[PhilipStubbs]

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.

[macswanton]

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👏👍

[dmach]

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.

[mopatop]

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.

[PunakiviAddikti]

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.

[jerzymikucki]

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)

[baxbanni]

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.

[cxob]

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!

[JossWhittle]

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.

[Miniellipse]

I knew about all the steps but the spar section cad steps were new to me. Thx for sharing.

[jongdesteven]

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!

[asdfdfggfd]

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.

[stevenedwards]

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

[lagovidz]

Thanks for this tutorial. You change my life in 3d printing with big nozzle