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31 Articles

Marines 3D-Print Part To Repair Multi-Million Dollar Fighter

August 23, 2018 by 71 Comments

The good news: all you need to complete the repair you’re working on is one small part. The bad news: it’s only available in a larger, expensive assembly. The worst news: shipping time is forever. We’ve all been there, and it’s a hard pill to swallow for the DIYer. Seems like a good use case for 3D-printing.

Now imagine you’re a US Marine, and instead of fixing a dishwasher or TV remote, you’ve got a $123 million F-35 fighter in the shop. The part you need is a small plastic bumper for the landing gear door, but it’s only available as part of the whole door assembly, which costs $70,000 taxpayer dollars. And lead time to get it shipped from the States is measured in weeks. Can you even entertain the notion of 3D-printing a replacement? It turns out you can, and it looks like there will be more additive manufacturing to come in Corps repair depots around the world.

Details of the printed part are not forthcoming for obvious reasons, but the part was modeled in Blender and printed in PETG on what appears to be a consumer-grade printer. The part was installed after a quick approval for airworthiness, and the grounded fighter was back in service within days. It’s encouraging that this is not a one-off; other parts have been approved for flight use by the Marines, and a whole catalog of printable parts for ground vehicles is available too. This is the reality that the 3D printing fiction of Lost in Space builds upon.

And who knows? Maybe there are field-printable parts in the disposable drones the Corps is using for standoff resupply missions.

[via 3D-Printing Industry]

Fire. Vortex. Cannon. Need We Say More?

April 18, 2018 by 8 Comments

Tornadoes are a rightfully feared natural disaster. Fire tornadoes are an especially odious event to contend with — on top of whatever else is burning. But, a fire vortex cannon? That’s some awesome eye candy.

The madman behind this cannon belching huge gouts of fire is none other than Youtuber [JAIRUS OF ALL]. This build is actually an upgrade to one of his previous projects — a fire tornado gun that burned itself out and is now twice-revived — and is arguably better at creating a proper vortex to direct the flames. Built around a modified NERF gun, a pair of 60mm electric ducted fans with some additional venting — and tunable via a speed controller — direct the airflow through slits in a vortex chamber. A backpack of liquid propane literally fuels this phoenix of a flamethrower, so [JAIRUS] had plenty of time to put together some great footage. Check it out!

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Mechanical/electrical jet engine model

Delightful Electromechanical Build Of A Jet Engine Model

February 24, 2018 by 9 Comments

[InterlinkKnight]’s jet engine model is a delight to behold and to puzzle out. Many of us have been there before. We know how to build something, we know it’s not the most up-to-date approach, but we just can’t help ourselves and so we go for it anyway. The result is often a fun and ingenious mix of the mechanical and the electrical. His electric jet engine model is just that.

Being a model, this one isn’t required to produce any useful thrust. But he’s made plenty of effort to make it behave as it should, right down to adding a piece of plastic to rub against a flywheel gear in order to produce the perfect high-pitched sound, not to forget the inclusion of the flywheel itself to make the turbine blades gradually slow down once the motor’s been turned off. For the N1 gauge (fan speed gauge) he built up his own generator around the motor shaft, sending the output through rectifying diodes to a voltmeter.

But the most delightful of all has to be the mechanical linkages for the controls. The controls consist of an Engine Start switch, Fuel Control switch and a throttle lever and are all built around a rheostat which controls the motor speed. The linkages are not pretty, but you have to admire his cleverness and just-go-for-it attitude. He must have done a lot of head scratching while getting it to all work together. We especially like how flipping the Fuel Control switch from cutoff to run levers the rheostat with respect to its dial just a little, to give a bit of extra power to the engine. See if you can puzzle it out in his Part 3 video below where he removes the cover and walks through it all.

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Small Jet Engine Model From Students Who Think Big

December 18, 2017 by 21 Comments

We love to highlight great engineering student projects at Hackaday. We also love environment-sensing microcontrollers, 3D printing, and jet engines. The X-Plorer 1 by JetX Engineering checks all the boxes.

This engineering student exercise took its members through the development process of a jet engine. Starting from a set of requirements to meet, they designed their engine and analyzed it in software before embarking on physical model assembly. An engine monitoring system was developed in parallel and integrated into the model. These embedded sensors gave performance feedback, and armed with data the team iterated though ideas to improve their design. It’s a shame the X-Plorer 1 model had to stop short of actual combustion. The realities of 3D printed plastic meant airflow for the model came from external compressed air and not from burning fuel.

Also worth noting are the people behind this project. JetX Engineering describe themselves as an University of Glasgow student club for jet engine enthusiasts, but they act less like a casual gathering of friends and more like an aerospace engineering firm. The ability of this group to organize and execute on this project, including finding sponsors to fund it, are skills difficult to teach in a classroom and even more difficult to test with an exam.

After X-Plorer 1, the group has launched two new project teams X-Plorer 2 and Kronos. They are also working to expand to other universities with the ambition of launching competitions between student teams. That would be exciting and we wish them success.

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Your Drone Is Cool, But It’s No Jet Fighter

November 16, 2017 by 45 Comments

There are some communities with whom our happy band of hardware hackers share a lot in common, but with whom we don’t often associate. The more workshop-orientated end of the car modification or railway modeler scenes, for instance, or the model aircraft fraternity. Many of these communities exist more for the activity than for the making, some of them dabble with building kits, but among them are a hard core of people who create amazing projects from scratch.

Take [Igor Negoda], for example. Not content with building just any model aircraft, he’s built his own from scratch, to his own design. And if designing for yourself what amounts to a scaled-down jet fighter wasn’t enough, he’s also built his own jet engine to power it. His videos are all in Russian so use YouTube’s subtitle feature if you’re not a Russian speaker, but they’re so good that if you couldn’t access the English translation you’d want to learn the language just to hear his commentary.

The video below the break shows us first a fast-taxi test using a ducted fan, then a full test flight with the jet engine. There is an explanation of the fuel system and the flight control systems, before an impressive flight from what appears to be a former Cold War-era runway. There are a few funny moments such as transporting a large model jet aircraft in a small hatchback car, but the quality of the work in a garage workshop shines through. Suddenly a multirotor doesn’t cut it any more, we want a jet aircraft like [Igor]’s!

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Everything Worth Knowing About Lockwire

October 20, 2017 by 29 Comments

We were tipped off to an older video by [AgentJayZ] which demonstrates the proper use of lockwire also known as ‘safety wire.’ In high vibration operations like jet engines, street racers, machine guns, and that rickety old wheelchair you want to turn into a drift trike, a loose bolt can spell disaster. Nylon fails under heat and mechanical lock washers rely on friction which has its limits. Safety wire holds up under heat and resists loosening as long as the wire is intact.

Many of our readers will already be familiar with lockwire since it is hardly a cutting-edge technology — unless you are talking about the cut ends of lockwire which [AgentJayZ] warns will slice up your fingers if you aren’t mindful. Some of us Jacks-or-Jills-of-all-trades, with knowledge an inch deep and a mile wide, may not realize all there is to lockwire. In the first eight minutes, we’ll bet that you’ve gotten at least two inches deep into this subject.

[Editor’s Note: an inch is exactly 25.4 mm, if the previous metaphors get lost in translation. A mile is something like 2,933.333 Assyrian cubits. Way bigger than an inch, anyway.]

Now, those pesky loose bolts which cost us time and sighs have a clear solution. For the old-hands, you can brush up on lockwire by watching the rest of video after the break.

Thank you [Keith Olson] for the tip, and we’ll be keeping an eye on [AgentJayZ] who, to date, has published over 450 videos about jet engines.

If safety isn’t your highest priority, consider this jet engine on a bicycle or marvel at the intricacies of a printable jet engine.

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A Jet Engine On A Bike. What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

September 18, 2017 by 76 Comments

On today’s edition of ‘don’t try this at home,’ we’re transported to Russia to see [Igor Negoda]’s working jet bicycle.

This standard mountain bike comes equipped with a jet engine capable of 18kg of thrust, fixed to the frame under the seat with an adjustable bracket to change it’s angle as needed. A cell phone is zip-tied to the frame and acts as a speedometer — if it works, it’s not stupid — and an engine controller displays thrust, rpm and temperature.  A LiPo battery is the engine’s power source with a separate, smaller battery for the electronics. The bike is virtually overgrown with wires and tubes that feed the engine, including an auxiliary fuel tank where a water bottle normally resides. Where’s the main fuel tank? In [Negoda]’s backpack, of course.

It certainly kicks up a mean dust cloud and makes a heck of a racket but the real question is: how fast does it go? From the looks of the smartphone, 72 km/h, 45 mph, or 18 rods to the hogshead.

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