I’m cautiously announcing a new project: the OpenRC H-1 Racer. Designing an airplane requires engineering, design and fabrication skills, and many hours of work. No one person will have all of these requirements. For success, the design work load must be shared amongst many people. This is an experiment in collaborative design.
The challenge we’ve set for ourselves is 3D printing very large molds to cast expanding foam parts as a “novel” airplane fabrication technique. Other reinforcing materials (carbon fibre, wood, etc…) will be employed as well. There are many technical challenges to this approach. Are there examples in the wild? If not, why not? Regardless, it will be fun and exciting to explore and hopefully overcome these challenges.
@Brook_Drumm is a project member and is going to help by building a very large 3D printer and will be producing a very large prototype. I plan to help design and use my Go Large to experiment and might make a scaled down version printable on my machine.
Anyone else with a common interest in design, aeronautics, and pushing boundaries want to help us? There are a lot of things you can do to help. For example:
-experimenting with 3d printed mold making for expandable foam,
-designing the model and its parts (CAD),
-finding solutions to the problems we will encounter,
-sourcing parts and budgeting,
-project management,
-Or just chat and discuss with us on the Google+ OpenRC community page, we accept +1s.
The drawings are being produced in Autodesk Fusion 360 which is free for this kind of work. I’m eager to explore their versioning system. All work will be produced under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.
Join us.
André
but I wish y’all the best of luck.