Building the frame

The frameI spent a few hours during the weekend building the copter frame. I first thought of bying a ready made frame, but that’ll wouldn’t be as fun as creating my own. I started with a 8×8 mm carbon fiber rod and mounted it around two 150x150x3 mm acrylic glass sheets. The carbon fiber rods were quite easy to work with. Cutting them with a disc using a Dremel were far easier than I expected. Drilling the holes using a regular 3mm HSS drill worked fine as well, though the drill itself was quite worn out afterwards.

The two larger holes are for the signal cables to the ESC’s and there are two identical holes on the bottom sheet for the power supply cables.

Mounted engineI also made some small discs from acrylic glass to use as supports for the engines. From a small brass tube I got some shims to give the engine mounts extra support (not in the picture). I’m actually quite happy with the result. The whole construction became really torsionally rigid.

Total weight, so far, is a bit below 1.2 kg, including calculated weight of all known components. The PCB with some cables still needs to be added though, but I’m quite confidente that the 2 kg limit won’t be a problem. The result now looks like this:

The frame with mounted engines