Yes, Yes I know. It has indeed been a long time coming.

It is understandable if the few of you who do sometimes visit this blog thought that we'd shut down, I must admit this is due to the fact that there wasn't much time for any work on project UAV since the summer holidays. However since exam season finished and I got my last cheque from the Arkwright Scholarship I decided that I owe it to the project to make some progress.
So I bought some components and did a little tinkering. Here are the results...
As you can see, in the world of amateur UAV design, size matters.
The 70mm diameter ducted fan at the bottom of the pic, produced quite a kick but wasn't anywhere near enough for the airframe. As of such I had to upgrade to the 340mm outboard prop to produce any reasonable thrust. Hopefully I should have some bench test vids up on the blog a little later.
So I suppose what one should take away from this is the fact that a cause is never lost as long as you keep fighting for it.
This UAV will fly someday and with my current burst of enthusiasm I am hopeful for a flight some time next feb. Fingers Crossed.

Wing progression

Today appeared to be pretty productive, got quite a bit done in an hour, managed to get the base of the wings glued on, and am halfway through gluing on the upper skin. Twinwall is again proving hard to trim in a nice straight line, especially if you're cutting diagonally across the flutes, so it's a bit messy.


I've had to secure some parts with tape (due to mistakes/trying to get the twinwall to bend), so it does look a bit shabby, but the finished product will be much nicer.

The more I look at the pictures, the more shabby it becomes. I swear it looked nicer in the workshop.

Things to do next session:

• Finish the gluing
• Construct the ailerons
• Attach the wing to the fuselage

I'm still thinking about the optimum angle of attack for our plane (if any). I was initially going for zero, but recent suggestions have said otherwise...

Pt. 2

Some more pictures - we've marked out the twinwall and we are going to glue the bottom and the top section together ( ideally we would have done the bottom section, then folded across the front of the wing, but our material unfortunately wasn't large enough).

After the long break..

Yes, I realise there hasn't been an update for quite some time now, but now we are striving to get as much work done as possible before the term ends. But first, a few pictures and updates, to get an idea of the progress we've made.


We've completely glued the wing ribs to the spar and also have marked out the twinwall to skin the wing with (yes, I know this is very littel progress but holidays have limited, well absolutely blocked, access to the workshop)

Nothing much to say

The MQ-5 Hunter by Northrop Grumman definitely seems like the kind of plane I want to see our project evolving into (on a different scale of course, and our ribs below definitely seem quite amateurish compared to the months of research and development that went into the Hunter).


Didn't really do much last tuesday, just finished off the wing ribs (turned out we had completely missed out a pair!) and finished drilling all the holes for the carbon spar, speaking of which, is completed.

Picture Update

Making the wings + attachment?

We finished the fuselage spine (and we cut a few more holes in it to allow for cable management). We've been working on some foam nosecones and underbody to take the landing, but unfortunately a certain someone made a right mess of it. Anyhows, we'll probably be evolving it into an acrylic nosecone for a FPV camera mounting.

As far as the wings ar concerned, the most of the wing ribs have been completed, shaped and sanded to size, but we've still to add weight-saving holes and a hole for the carbon spar to go through. After that it's a case of putting them on the spar and skinning it with some 2mm twinwall. Once that's done, we have the nightmare of attaching it to the fuselage, a problem presented due to the lack of foresight on my part. I was initially hoping for some kind of removable wing attachment, but that dream is long gone...

After that, we've to sort out the control surfaces, and I've got a pretty good of how the ailerons are going to work, as well as the elevators. We've also acquired some new hardware, as our previous electronics were, well, a bit cheap (and they definitely won't be able to cope with the bigger airframe).