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TPU Canopy
Turns out, even when they’re mostly made of metal and carbon fiber, flying small tiny machines at speeds up to 100mph sometimes results in bits breaking.
In the case of this post, the item in question was a plastic canopy for a 3″ quad.
Normally, as someone who owns 3D printers, breaking something made of plastic isn’t too much of a problem. As I couldn’t be bothered to design my own, lets take a quick look on Thingiverse.
Unfortunately not quite as perfect as I first thought. Resolution is fairly low, the back is all ugly, the fin isn’t tall enough and the front bumper isn’t actually attached. It’s not even symmetrical. *sigh* Solidworks it is.
I started off by reverse engineering the design from Thingiverse, getting to at least the stage of a clean, symmetrical, single body model. But… while I’m here, might as make some improvements:
First off I made the fin considerable bigger and neatened up all the edges. I rebuilt the rear end to be a lot neater. Extended and beefed up the camera protection a little. Added bores for captive nuts and finally something new I’ve been working on…
You can buy lengths of 2mm carbon fiber rod from eBay for next to nothing and it turns out the toughness of TPU combined with the stiffness of CF make a perfect combination. So I’ve been coring out my parts and pressing Carbon fiber into them wherever I can.
In this case, I reinforced the fin to stop it getting ripped off or just folding over when on its back and also added a strut to the front to stop the thing bending in and hitting the flight stack.
Files as always available on Thinigverse here:
Credit to
“nmaggioni” on Thingiverse for the original design.
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