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| Entertaining the crowd in the "hangar" area . |
This November I participated in Red Bull Flugtag with a team called the Slammin Tri Lambs. We were trying to build a plane that would fly as opposed to one for comic relief. The design was supposed to resemble a double-necked guitar with wings and picks for a tail.
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| Quick CAD work for the event application. |
The plane was a short wing, long cord, canard aircraft designed to use ground effects to gain extra lift. For this project I did most of the initial design work, with input from the team, and all of the CAD work.
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| Version 1. |
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| Version 2. |
The plane was designed around easily available and cheap materials from the local hardware store. The spars and fuselage were made from a plywood and foam sandwich for strength. These were surprisingly strong and could easily hold up a person when cantilevered out. The wings on each side could be pulled off for transportation. All the complex shapes were cut with a water-jet.
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| Water-jetted foam pieces. |
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| Water-jetted plywood pieces. |
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| Nearing completion. Elevator moved to the back. |
After some model testing, the team decided to move the elevator to the rear for ease of calculating the center of gravity (CG) of the plane. If we had more time, I believe we could have made the canard work. However, the plane was built in only about two weeks.
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| Painted and ready for some final touches. |
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| McCovey Cove with the 30 ft launch platform. |
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| End result. |
Unfortunately, the plane did not fly. After the event, we suspected two mistakes that may have caused the plane to nosedive off the platform. First, we had the plane sitting on the cart too far forward, which nosed us down as the cart went off the platform. Ideally, we should have had the CG of the plane closer to the back of the cart, allowing the plane to separate from the cart more easily. The second mistake was using paracord for the the elevator controls. After watching video from the event, we noticed that the elevator moved about a third of what it should have been capable of, meaning that the paracord was probably stretching.
A video of the live stream can be seen here. We come on at the 1:36:00 mark.
