Homemade Electric Airplane MK4

This video is sponsored by Cubico. Alright, DIY Airplane Mark IV video, part number two, so a lot of things have changed since the last video. I mean, I feel pretty good about this. The wings are on. They don't feel too heavy right now. It's 14 pounds on each side. I'm really hoping to add another eight pounds to each wing and that's being pretty generous, so if I go out with that I'll be pretty well prepared as far as the olive weight of the fuselage wings. They are sanded, everything is finished, we are putting on the vinyl covering and this is very unorthodox, but that is why I look like experimental aviation and it is also why I am reining in and sticking to it a little to not post plans for this It's because this is definitely interesting.

They could be pretty reliable wings for maybe two or three years or they could be completely disastrous if you look at the sun and then know it will all be over in a couple of days. It's fun the way I like it. This is because I don't have a lot of money involved in this, it's actually the aluminum that's the most expensive part and maybe the hot wired foam, so yeah, experimental aviation, yeah, although we're in the ultralight class now, the vinyl . In fact, I'm going to slightly melt the foam and vinyl and try to fuse the adhesives together as much as possible.

I think this will really keep this separate thing stuck together. I actually made a test piece a year ago and it's actually still very difficult to separate these kinds of methods from each other so it's working pretty well, it definitely doesn't look good but I hope it stays attached because I'm more worried about how cheap and effective you already know. a high speed finish this is not a high speed finish this is not a high speed plane I'm also curious about this vinyl cover and how much it will weigh so let's first get a wing weight of 198 pounds which is actually not bad All of this is much lighter than all my previous wings.

Hopefully, the vinyl covering I'm only expecting about three pounds per panel, so hopefully I'll fly with 23 pounds per panel and I'll definitely be on my way to making my final light at 21 pounds. It's still 20 pounds so it looks like we're going to get out, maybe about a pound to a pound and a quarter so far, that's not too bad, I'm just covering with vinyl, so yeah, these will be very light wings when I'm done . Alright, now we have the rest covered on the other side, it looks like it weighs 22 pounds on the scale. This is officially the lightest complete wing I've ever made for one of my crappy

homemade

airplane

s.

Okay, let's do the other one and then we can move. Continuing with testing, these are the same sandbags I used the last time I stretched the design of my third plane. Now it's time for the wing loading test because I did a bunch of engineering, which seems fine, which is horrible for aircraft design, but fortunately. I have experience building

airplane

s and some real aero friends came and looked at this. Also, I have used basic components that are used in other traditional ultralights with the same weight class, so this should pass with flying colors because everything is much lighter than the one I am using, let's figure it out with this, all that it's not up it weighs about 100 pounds and then I weigh about 150 pounds to stow it safely, so that's 250 pounds, so if we have 250 pounds on the wing, that's a g, so it's basic normal flying, if we double that we'll get the two g's and that's still okay whatever it is it's good enough 750 3gs 3gs is actually a lot for an old flight flying on a quiet afternoon so we'll probably stop sitting here we can go a just over 750 depending on how many sandbags we have, I don't think we'll get to 4g, that's a thousand pounds and that's a lot. weight also we're doing this a little bit differently this is kind of wrong but I have a block here where we configure an airplane because the only thing we're not really going to do a good test on is the fuselage itself because the members that hold the wings are going to be compressed rather than tensioned, so if my original plan was to put it on the roof, however, I couldn't get stuff in there to do that, so we're going to have to do it this way and just test the stringers, the struts of the wings and the central part of the fuselage.

We just won't be able to test the strength of this right here, which is the center part of the fuselage, because it's normal flight. it would actually separate instead of compressing well, let's start the test, okay, that's one g, that's very obvious, it's going to survive, let's get to the cheese, this is two g's, this is probably the most I'll ever do. Logically, charge it in flight. I'm also looking for a compression here because it's loaded incorrectly, like this thing is being squashed right now. You will usually separate in flight, so this is a little different than how you would actually do it. being loaded, I'm lowering the wing and it's barely deformed at all, there's no real flex, so now it's getting heavy, so we're at 900 pounds, so we're not at four, but we're above three.

It's good enough for me, I'm happy, I want to measure the deflection and then take off the sandbags and see what we get. Okay, now let's find the support completely. That's a lot of weight for some Styrofoam. I see some things happening here. I know it's like leaning a little bit, look it's leaning, that's why it's like that, yeah, that's why it's flexed, this isn't compression, but luckily it's not, it doesn't seem permanent, so when I take it off it should come back. just as it was but the windshield is being pushed out, ok I'll just take it all off, well the wing seems to be back to normal, it just covers a bit of sand, actually it was also a good test of the foam itself , because there's actually no ribs or any type of wood here and all that force is located like in the center of the foam, where actually the spars are out here, but the sandbag was here, so all of that actually It sank right into the foam, so it's really impressive that with that pattern cut into it the armor shape, it was still able to survive very easily and not bend, crack or tear from the bottom, so we're definitely more than ready because a normal flight when stressed will make it be dispersed almost evenly over the surface, it really depends on your angle of attack, but that's just more complexity of the plane, but I'm very, very satisfied with what I see so far, I don't have ideas on how to do it yourself yet, I have no idea. how long is this really going to last this is a very big experiment that is hidden among the comments on the internet it seems that I actually found more information about this engine it turns out that someone actually received a communication from vitorazzi, which is the manufacturer's engine and it turns out that This psru or propeller speed reduction unit doesn't like to be pulled, like my plane, because it's in a tractor configuration, so unfortunately this isn't going to have to work, so I had to crank up and start from scratch, it basically turns out that Actually, I have a friend, Paul, from openpbg.

He's been working on a couple of single-engine

electric

motors and I thought, hmm, that's cool, maybe I should get back into doing

electric

, especially since you know things have moved on in the last four years since I made an electric ultralight. . so now we're going to use something that's electric. I don't do much more than that because my shitty engine mount installed all the electronics and stuff and started the engine. Works. Fortunately, it didn't explode, but I discovered that I can. Put the small propeller on the really big motor. The reason I'm not using the propeller is that I'm still waiting on the motor mount, so I'm going to check that the ammeter works and I'm going to put a small one on. load it up by putting this propeller on, it will push the air back moving in the wrong direction, but hey, at least I'll be able to watch the gauge do things and confirm everything works before moving on to the big motor.

We are currently consuming one ampere, one ampere. at 92 volts 130 watts oh this is the good stuff coming from this side one thing I did just in case uh let's say the motors are leaking oh no oh no I don't like this pull it just completely disconnect the system, so it no longer works now, however, you don't want to have the clever idea of ​​plugging this thing back in because 92 volts without a spark arrester, oh, it's going to make a big spark. I have the engine mount. Take advantage of that winch. come on, that was on full power, I can't even take it off it sounds very smooth, I'm actually very happy, it doesn't terrify me, the funny thing is I didn't mention this, but when I was using the old 185 humidifier this.

The thing was like shaking, this is really smooth, crispy and clean, no caffeine, it's done much faster than on other planes. Basically, it's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ten bolts and that's it, I really don't know. count the fairing, you know, close the wingtips so it's literally just ten bolts, put the pins on them and voila, I'm going to do a preflight because obviously this is the first time we've flown with us and you. You really should preflight any airplane, but this one needs a thorough inspection because it's been towed now, so I need to make sure everything is set up and then I'll start the taxi test or the low altitude flight test, I'm probably just applying it if it's too windy because you don't have either so you would have to do it to keep the wings touching the ground, one last thing don't forget the eye grease kit in case you get a hit. because the propeller comes back and hits me in the face clip clip yeah yeah all the foam is fine the batteries are stuck trying to put the aero bolt holder on that's what I call it just vanes and it should stop it from spinning if I think that this works the way I think it's going to work.

The thing with this point is that it doesn't have ailerons, if this were a plane with ailerons, if I start to get too high off the ground the wing starts to roll, I just flatten it down with a better stroke. and just flying, you know, adjacent, like crawling down the runway, this is another round, so if I get to that stage I'll probably have to break the water but gain more altitude to keep the wings from touching the ground, so at that stage I'm probably flying so I'll fly to the end and bring it back down or if it's too high I'll just fly it and go around the planes.

We are ready to fly. Flying. I forgot how to steer the plane. I'm trying to say, oh wait, yeah, rudder, it's always better inside a nose-heavy airplane for the first few flights, but I think you could probably put a few pounds on the tail, so I'm going to put this on the queue I want to do. they just kind of notice how you do it from the beginning no, I won't fall, I'll be very different, I'll probably barely notice this, but it's something I do is I need a weapon, so when I'm flying if the plane weighs too much the tail I look back I shoot the water bottle the water ball empties its fluids and then I become a nose heaviness resumed and I can continue flying fine, they already saw me fly so it was a complete flight power all the time this thing no It makes no push once it starts going a little fast I was like max heart it was like just flying off the edge so I was like yeah we're going round and round on the ground coming off the ground I want to be on the ground okay we're back of the first flight.

Yeah, that didn't go as well as I wanted. The pitch speed, the propeller was too flat, meaning it couldn't accelerate even with the throttle. Set at full power, the power was basically spinning as fast as possible, however, the speed of the approaching air was too fast. Also, one thing I found really interesting because I had never flown an airplane without ailerons, which is basically a two-aileron airplane. The shaft control was that the rudder is extremely responsive as far as roll control and much better than I thought it would be, especially if you look at one of these tests here, you'll notice that when I kicked the rod, it turned a lot and Actually, that It was induced by the coupling of the entire body of the dihedral and where the rudder is, etc., so it flew very well and satisfied my control requirements.

The second thing I noticed was the leading edge of the elevator, which The surface here was fluttering a bit. This made me very, very, very nervous. I knew it could have been a possibility. I just didn't think it would happen at this kind of airspeed which is around 35 miles per hour. So what was happening was I couldn't see it during the taxi test because I was more concerned with just flying down the runway, now getting away from it and having some time to gain some speed. I realized it was probably hovering, maybe. at about three inches from the center line of deviation, it's too much for me, it makes me a little nervous, so I thought, okay, I need to slow it down, fly it on the edge of the minimum flight speed I could fly andjust bring it back slowly and put it back on the ground because we need to make some changes so now that we know we need to change we're going to do it the first thing I'm going to do is cut off the old wing.

I'm literally going to remove the foam cap with a hot wire and then add three feet to it, it's actually very simple because the way I've designed the swings is two lumens per bar, it's usually like a ladder style ultra flight wing, like this I literally just machined some spacers, slid the aluminum tubes in, put some glue on top and literally added more vinyl. and then the wing is ready, that's all. I added a three foot extension to the link panel so it now has a higher aspect ratio so it should fly better because there is almost no penalty for adding an extra wing except for an extra wing structure but it does.

I did. that by taking more aluminum tubing and just pushing it in, we've made a little more modifications. I added the wheel to my tail skin because I'll probably do more taxi testing this time because I hate dragging when I actually fly. I'm taking them off because I like brakes and by brakes I mean dragging the tail on the ground. We now have a three-bladed propeller for better performance. The propeller has more pitch because the last time we flew a plane in first gear. You can imagine this: It's basically riding a bike at 30 miles per hour in first gear.

You have to pedal very fast but you are not actually accelerating. There is a bit of resistance but the joint spins very fast because I noticed the amp draw dropped a lot and it's also worth noting that I flew with 11 kilowatts of power to put everything into perspective because those are just numbers. My first plane had 25 kilowatts of power available and I probably flew about 20 kilowatts of that, so it's pretty good that it flew with 11 kilowatts, it should be even less with the increase in wingspan and with this propeller with more pitch I should get more kilowatts and I put the meter in and I can output, I think it's about 18 kilowatts now at full power.

So it's better, we're ready and my flight plan is basically to fly, but we'll see if it feels really good. I'll probably continue climbing and we'll fly. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. It's actually not that simple, so I thought about this ahead of time, like the tall ones specifically handle a low-speed, low-performance airplane, because many of you have pointed out that you need to fly that thing at a thousand feet and then some to be able to. do it. use that rocket parachute, well yes, but also kind of no. The strange thing about my plane is that it runs like it's in such a low performance category, it's just below 25 knots and that's like flying pretty well too, it's not the fault that kills specifically. when you jump off a building it's sudden deceleration and you don't have much potential energy that needs to be absorbed somewhere.

If I just had a complete structural failure like below 50 feet it would probably give me a 75 Chance of Survival, maybe the rudder falls off or something catastrophic, maybe even a complete wing collapse, which is very unlikely in this case. There are 75 chances of me surviving. Now come the problems like scaling from further away, like 100 feet to a thousand feet. it puts me in a very strange area because it's high enough where I can get enough speed to hit the ground very hard and suddenly stop and probably also scramble my brain low enough that I don't have time to literally throw the parachute by hand, which probably needs a little over 500, maybe even a thousand feet to deploy successfully, so I give myself a parenthesis on how I would survive and this is it, if the plane doesn't climb very, very fast , I will stay more or less.

I'm low because I'm thinking if it doesn't go up very well I'll stay low because I know it's safe down here and I know I have a pretty good chance of getting away because a lot of guys are using this metric like a compound airplane or something that flies at about 80 knots at a speed of similar takeoff, something below 1500, assuming the plane has a ballistic recovery system that is a rocket parachute or something similar, it would have very, very, very little chance of survival in any case. would happen and having altitude is your friend specifically in this case because it gives you more time to think if their engine went out or something, but a structural failure all the energy has to go somewhere, it probably won't end well That's why I actually have a slightly different flight plan planned for my ultralight.

We should fly now, so, hey, hmm, that flies great. I'm very happy with that. Oh, the cruiser has about 80 to 90 amps, give or take, it flies at a nice comfortable 30. miles per hour, that's my dream machine, yeah, that was much better, much, much more satisfying, maybe the most satisfying old flight I have ever designed and whipped. It still didn't have as much power as I thought. I think I needed. advance the tone of the accessories a little more, however, this thing flies very well, I wasn't actually sweating at all, it was more of a nervous laugh flying like ooh, I'm flying and this is cool, so obviously I decided not to do it.

Go up really high because, well, my deck was anemic, so I couldn't really get out of that safe support because within that time range I know you need to get out really fast to be safe, so I thought I'd fight low. I like to fly solo slow anyway and that's what this airplane is specifically designed for. Anyway, it is a two-axis design. Many of you are still going crazy. I realized it's like yeah, yeah, yeah, drones are cool and all, though, if you look back. Back in the days of the 1970's and early 80's a lot of ultralights were two axis, I only mentioned a few designs, the Sky Pup and the Weed Hopper, they were both amazing planes and I really hadn't heard anything bad about it so I gave it a try. knew.

It would probably be fine and well, okay, it flies fine, so in future mods there are a few more things I want to clean up, like putting aero struts in there and sealing the gaps and so on, but that costs money and this project. It was a very expensive project considering all the batteries and electric motors and stuff, that's why I would really like to thank kibiko for sponsoring this video and making this possible. Many of you asked me, Peter, how did you get so good at basically doing things when I was a kid, I tinkered with caddisflies a lot, this is the veto I've been working on and that's why I'm very happy that Kiwico is sponsoring this video, kiwico mixes, foundation boxes tailored to science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics also known as vapor these boxes are amazing everything you need is inside the box so you don't have to run to the store.

I was really impressed because they even gave me a battery to complete this robot. The good thing about kiwico. They make all kinds of different boxes depending on your age group and the topic you want to cover once you complete your projects. They even have supplemental information in the books to modify your project to learn even more or make your robot fly. Fireworks are not included. That's why tinkercrate and kiwico are a great learning opportunity if you have kids or if you want to experiment or learn something new or just develop some things. This is actually great supplemental information that you can give to your children or yourself if you wish. learning something at home, so these products are great hands-on experiences because at the end of the day, I learned best by playing and just getting my hands involved with these things if you're looking for a great way to get started. something, try these things, I'm impressed with them and they have all kinds of cool stuff and I hope they send me some more to play with these products, they look a lot like the stuff I work on, although everything is included in the box and there are There is much less fire involved than all kinds of dangerous things.

We have to be safe for children. You know that, so these things are really cool. If you check out the link below, you can save up to fifty percent off your first month of your Kiwico subscription. Check the link. I'm kiwico.com, Peter Sheeple, and I'm bringing you one of these things today, so it's been quite an adventure. I'm very happy with it, it flies so well if you want to see more flight footage of this and more raw stuff before. It's time to check out Sam's channel, he's been doing his thing lately, especially if you want to see things early because you can see this flying around weeks in advance, but anyway, thanks everyone for watching, enjoy some more of the smooth additional material. and I will see you next time I you