General printing instructions and guidelines
These are some guidelines derived from my printing experience and they could require readjusting according to your machine type and 3D printing techniques you use. I know people started experimenting with tilted prints to increase the strength and surface quality but I wonβt be mentioning these things here. The instructions Iβm giving here are more like what I used to achieve the product. So feel free to adopt and adapt.
For all the parts I used Cura Creawsome Mod. It seems to be fusing the filaments better and it has ironing functions on almost every layer. This results in compact prints. I tried other slicers and I even increased the extrusion factor, but only Cura gave me the necessary strength at the painful cost of increasing the printing time twice. I sliced the wheel lids with Slic3r and they ended up delaminating and breaking because of vibrations during a takeoff, as you see in the video.
Print all the parts at 0.1 to 0.2mm resolution. I printed all of them at 0.2mm layer height.
Itβs recommended to increase the printing temperature with up to 5% of your regular one for that specific type of filament you use. This could create oozing but the structures would end up more compact.
Fuselage A section:
The solid block one
4 shells,
6 top and bottom layers
Trim the window section and the flat base with the soldering iron after printing.
The perforated one
Trim the window inner walls and make a hole into the flat base after printing to make it more lightweight.
Fuselage B,C,D sections
Use support materials and print as they are. Aligning the fibres horizontally will give the parts the needed torsion strength. I used the line support pattern from Cura which comes off easily.
I had almost no infill. I matched up the number of the shells with the number of top/bottom layers so I would get a pretty much solid print. Next time I would try to use only 3 shells and up to 4 top/bottom layers to make them lighter and use less material on them.
Fuselage E,F sections
Reorientate the F piece nose down. I think I uploaded it nose up. So flat base down because this flat base will be the motor attachment plate and it needs to be compact.
Be careful. Use at least 20 bottom layers for this F section so the motor will not be attached on a thin paper like shell.
Print the E section as it is and donβt rotate. I printed both of these sections with no supports.
Cowl
The long one looks better on the plane and fits nicer with the F section of the fuselage. I uploaded the short one too so you could install the one that fits better according to the size of your motor. Both of them prints with no supports, nose down. I think I uploaded the short one nose up so you will need to rotate it. If you decide to go with the short cowl, you would probably need to make the flat motor mounting plate of the F section less sharp around the edges. I had to fillet these edges with about 5mm to make the short cowl fit properly.
Exhaust arrays
2 to 3 shells
10% infill
Attach permanently to the cowl using glue or spot welded with the soldering iron. I heated them up a little bit with the heatgun before gluing to the plane just to give them a curled shape that would follow the line of the fuselage better.
I used 4 screws (2.5X8) to attach the cowl to the fuselage as you can see in the pictures.
Wings and middle section
I generated the line support using Cura and I aligned the lines with the wing ribs.
Check the last picture in the list for example
Cockpit
Print using line support material.
2 shells, 4 top layers
0% infill
trim the flat base after printing