How I Designed a 3D Printed Wing

0:36 At the beginning you seem to manually draw out the wing profile. In Fusion 360 and Onshape, there are addons that will automatically draw them out for you. In Fusion the addon is called "Airfoil Generator". The Onshape one is created by Darren Lynch

You are always genious. No matter whether Tim or Tom. Saw you first with your magnetic coil gun years ago. But what I didn't get here is that the airfoil can be printed without supports.

I love that you share your methodology so freely for us to Follow. Thank you!!!

Yes!! Lovely. I always wondered how you did this, it seems like magic to me. Sure I can design a maze for a mouse, a thread adapter, etc, but the engineering for a wing? Amazing. Plus the added complexity that vase mode can bring.

Tim Station > Tom Stanton

Spiral mode itself is so satisfying. But your design for spiral mode is just gorgeous. Love it

Thanks for sharing your workflow! There may be other ways to get to the result you've achieved, or perhaps that's what those 3 weeks were for, but I always enjoy watching someone cadd who knows what they're doing.

Man Tim needs to meet Tom! Imagine the ideas they could create.

Awesome to see you have made a video on this! I was very curious myself what kind of little tricks you employed, but it makes a lot of sense seeing how its done.

Thank you for the guide. I gives us a very good insight in the process. I'm always humbled by your creativity. Btw, you don't need to remove the combine step. You can move the current marker in history graph to place before the combine step and add what you need. When you move the marker back to the end you will have combine step amended by the cutouts (around 10:30)

You Monster! Just went trough it as a total newbie in Fusion 360, sliced it in Cura and it turned out very clean. But it's hard to comprehend how it's possible for a person to imagine it and then make it in working design. Incredible, my compliments!

Dude thank you so much for this. I am an EE so making the wing ribs was breaking my brain how you design them. Holy cow this opens up so many options for me. For tons of stuff not just planes.

Wow, what a tour 😍 Impressive build for a wase mode print! Thanks for sharing your expirence with all of us 👍 😀

I'm glad you mentioned the time it took to work it out. The next chap would do the maths, adjust for inflation, and charge a fee for what we all just got for a click. Good on yer mate👏👍

I had been trying to copy your work here and spent all evening trying to find a tutorial on how to do this only dimly remembering this video, and this video is one of the best tutorials on this technique.

Thank you very much for this guide, excellent write up on the description to hack the vase mode. I had to rewatch the "combine tool" use a couple of times to find out that you are in fact cutting the ribs from the main body.. Now i understand the process!

Thank you very much for this tutorial! Really, really nice! This will save me a lot of time, because after I saw your video on the VTOL, I knew I want to design an airplane with such a wing myself.

Huge thanks for sharing your time and knowledge so clearly. I have an Eclipson RC plane and always wondered how they designed the lightweight structure with very little stringing and I think you have solved the mystery for me!! Having followed your really excellent guidance with Fusion I managed to produced a 200mm test piece with excellent results. Instead of slicing the ribs at the mid point, I used offset to slice 0.8mm from the top of the ribs just under the surface of the top wing skin, that way the top surface of the wing prints perfectly and the "joins" for the 2 layers are on the under surface. Using PRUSA slicer settings from LW PLA, similar to those from 3DLabprint the results are very clean fast light weight prints (not using spiral mode). If you optimise the gap, and print settings the ribs connect nicely to the top skin as material foams... brilliant. Would echo some comments about Airfoil generator but thats not the point of your video. Next project (after the light weight "test" glider") with my 11year old son is to replicate his Balsa/Monocote RC Fokker DR1 in LW PLA. Tom, your videos are always informative... my son is always watching and says wants to become an engineer one day...so you are also inspiring the next generation... many thanks for the great content!

This is clever. You end up with a solid model but only for the surfaces. I would struggle as I want the cad model to be of the geometry that I wanted, but that is not exactly what you have here. Very clever. Well done and thanks for sharing.

Having experimented with surface/vase mode for model aircraft wings myself I viewed your video with interest. I use TurboCad and therefore had to adapt your Fusion 360 method accordingly to achieve the same model results, but it was very much worth the effort. The model prints just as you describe, brilliant. I can see why it took you three weeks to work the process out, and even now I struggle with the logic to work in the "negative" to achieve the correct "positive" print result with Surface printing. Also avoiding double (overprinting) print lines and stop/start printing. "simple when you know". Thank you

Oh, very nice job. I'm a fan of B. Wallice and his geodetic aircraft construction - Vickers Wellington. I'm glad that a similar solution is still alive. I wish you much success.

Thanks for walking us through the f360 steps. There's a lot that can be learned here.

This is a REALLY straight forward presentation of a How-to in Fusion 360. Might just get me past a design hurdle. Then - Watchout world! Thanks Tom

Quick note: when 3D printing a wing, *use white filament!* Black filament will absorb so much sunlight that it'll make PLA and foam soft enough to cause sagging or even structural failure.

Very cool to see how you did this. More complicated than I suspected but it makes sense after watching your video, nicely done! Cheers

Super useful and very well explained, thanks Tim and also to your twin brother Tom 👍

I knew about all the steps but the spar section cad steps were new to me. Thx for sharing.

So clever! Easy when you know how to do it! Thanks for doing the hard part and sharing it!

Thanks for this tutorial. You change my life in 3d printing with big nozzle

As someone who uses rhino pretty much exclusively for modelling, parametric programs blow my mind when used like this!

Thank you for stating just how long this took you. When I saw this I originally thought “there’s no way I could do anything like that” even though I’m experienced in F360. When you said it took several weeks it restored my confidence that given enough time I could come up with solutions like this. Often a creator will skip over just how much time it took to get to a solution

There are good airfoil generator Plugins for F360 to import an Airfoil form an .dat file so you have it as some nice splines. I Printed some wings with a similar method, and printed the same segment with gyroid infill, and the gyroid was way lighter but the strength was very lackluster as a lot of the lw-pla in the infill was not boned correctly together. Will retry to make my wing with some stuff i learned form this video. Great content!

Hi Tim! I have printed your airfoil and I made a test run. The airflow is impressive!

Awesome, I was hoping you would make a video like this. Really informative. FYI you can use the "offset" tool to make these thin shapes (e.g. 13:49) and the whole thing you could have created surface extrusions and used the "thickness" tool to make it a 0.1mm solid body.

Interesting. I was amazed how thin your rib pattern is! I am used to SLA printing, so it is interesting to see how you adapt the structure to an additive process.

thanks tom this solves so many issues for me you have no idea!

I realize the work that went into this vid means you started before we requested a guide, but I'd like to think that me asking for one is why you made this. Thanks for the guide!

Hey Tom, so to make your life a little easier, there is LW PLA by Polymaker. It is different from the foaming stuff by colorfabb or eSun as it is basically "pre-foamed" . It has very low density and prints like regular PLA. It maybe a touch heavier than foaming stuff, but for your new project where you teased even a canopy/nose with similar structure to the wing, it maybe easier to work with. And it is cheaper than every foaming pla i could find (at least where I live)

This is really useful I can already tell I'm going to need this at some point for printing

I think there's a bit to be done in terms of optimizing your CAD workflow and making it more amenable for parameterization but this is a really exciting design. Looking forwards to playing around with this! I wonder how much of a pain it would be to have varying aerofoil profiles over the length of the wing, and to consider how chunks of wing can include tabs/slots to help them mate together. Brilliant work as always, Tom.

Thank you a lot, I've been thinking a while how to design a wing and your method really liked me.

I think you became a reference in how to design a wing to print in LW-PLA. Concratulation tom

You read my mind by making this video. Thanks! Love it!

As an old RC plane guy- balsa with plastic heat shrink covering. Extremely light and strong. Also durable as long as you don’t crash it. All the 3d printed and foam built stuff I see are all extremely heavy with poor structural strength. I feel like the opportunity to mix 3d printed traditional rib structure with traditional style build. Carbon spars, 3d printed ribs, carbon leading edge spar, trailing edge, could even use balsa sheeting on the front section of the foil/wing in a traditional manner. Cover with monokote or similar. You get a incredibly strong and light wing👍. I feel like it would be possible to shed nearly 1/2 the structural weight of some of the best 100% printed wings I have seen while having far higher structural strength. Granted this adds traditional assembly back into the mix but the results of mixing the best of all the materials has high potential for some incredible weight to strength possibilities. All translating to superior flight characteristics, flight time, durability ie air frame life etc. I would fly my old school balsa gas planes for 2-3 yrs nearly every weekend before the vibration from the engine started to cause structural failure in the tail section. Classic failure of an old RC plane with lots of flight hours was the loss of a horizontal flight control on the tail due to structural failure.

I have used Blender to basically hand drawn similar structure using 3d faces. The model has zero volume but in spiral print mode the edge is printed correctly and you can design the exact print path yourself. I hope this helps someone.

Nice job ! By offseting the extrados of the ribs by 0.5mm right before the "Combine" feature, I obtain a clean extrados. By that I mean that the extruder draws the extrados in one smooth line and on the intrados, it draws the ribs and supports. This helps for the aerodynamics because the extrados is smoother.

Looking at the wing i thought it would be a lot more complicated, i am not surprised it took you 3 weeks to find out. Its an interesting method for sure and might be useful for other projects too

I actually experimented with LW-PLA and simply making the extruded wing profile a solid object, but made a hole for wing spar etc, and then just used 1 perimeter for the shell, and used "cubic" infill in PrusaSlicer. When you set the infill to 1 to 3%, it creates something very similar to the spar structure you modelled - and the spar hole automatically created a box inside the wing, and the cubic infill, while not as nice as a precisely designed one, still was doing a pretty good job with minimal effort, and the wing was remarkably light.

Stunning. I’ll be trying this asap.

Brilliant so far 🙂 How would you optimise the design with FEA (finite element analysis) to minimise the amount of printed material and still retain sufficient strength?

Very clever design, well done.

Thank you for showing how to do this. You saved me a lot of time.

Hi Tim. Although your rib-slicing technique seems a good idea to get a smooth surface, for the size of wing and low speed of the vehicle you're talking about, and the resulting small Re-Number, it would actually be overall much better to leave the ribs whole so they form a proper, continuous torsion box between top and bottom skin, and accept the small imperfections on the surface. In many slicers these days you can define the seam location on the perimeter and this would have been a much better way of avoiding having them in the wrong places. As soon as they're behind the transition to turbulent flow all is well and you wouldn't notice any difference. Your wing will be *much* stronger, and thus potentially lighter, then with the sliced ribs. Also, next time have a look at using NURBS curves rather than arc segments in the initial sketch. This way you have much better control over the geometry, and avoid the curvature discontinuity between the constant curvature arc segments. Other than that good content with great tips for beginning wing designers.

In the future I would love to see you use the shape optimization tool. I am doing some research and am using that tool to generate my rib shapes based on surface pressures.

Thank you for sharing this process. Cheers!

13:45 To make tiny cut gaps fuse better In PrusaSlicer there is a settings called "Slice gap closing radius: 0.049mm" it mean that it closes gaps smaller than 0.049mm which limits how small gaps you can make. In your design you use 0.1mm gaps which could be smaller if you decreased "gap closing radius" to maybe 0.005mm (don't remember might go even lower).

really clever CAD, thanks for the tutorial

Genius! Thanks for sharing Tom/Tim!

Great work. You show us how to do it, but, I am still bending my brain why this works so well with the spiral mode of the 3D printer. I guess I just have to try it out.

Thats really interesting and thanks for sharing the design process. Do you glue 200mm long sections together to make the full wingspan and did you design any specific features into the surfaces to ensure a good fit between each section?

Thank you for an excellent guide to create these wings! As a tutorial video, would you be able to highlight the shortcuts and hotkeys that you've used, spoken or written?

Cheers Tom, excellent tutorial!

Woww! You did it exactly as i was working on a UAV a few years ago!

i spent ALL DAY yesterday trying to reverse engineer and figure out how you model these things i had no idea this video existed oml where was this when i needed it most

I was very interested about the process when I saw your last video.

Great example and 101 how to begin and get the basics

Still my favorite video of yours!

Really you spent a lot to share us such techniques, at least we should say thank you very much. Go ahead bro good luck

Effin genius. Love this concept.

Thanks for this perfect video. It saved me almost three weeks to figure it out myself ;-)

Thanks for sharing! Great technique.

This is perfect timing! I'm working on designing my first model for printing, this helps a ton!

Just what I was looking for! Great tutorial!

2:46 [Edited because I realized what you were doing. My first suggestion is still good advice for an instance like 6:19 .]Just so you know, you can "offset" lines using the O key and it basically does this automatically. Though, it will be an offset which would mean that the lines would be moved upward or downward depending on which way the copy goes. To get around this, I normally make a line then offset on both sides of the original line. Then make the original line a construction line. Edit: Actually in this situation I would've done a rectangular pattern

“Just winging it.” 😆

I call this the "continuous path vase mode hack". You see it around, but it is quite rare. I'm not into planes, but I've used this method when the design time is justified and I want to print many multiples of something that prints fast and is strong. Shelf brackets, table legs, rugged custom containers, etc. Have you thought of using a belt printer? The 45 degree print geometry lets you print fully-enclosed shapes in vase mode (all 6 sides of a cube, for example). The ability to print long wings in one piece might be useful. I notice that your ribs are basically 2 perimeters pressed together flat like a ribbon. Have you considered separating those 2 lines to create a tubular structure and (maybe) more rigidity?

amazing work. Thank you.

You're great TOM! Thanks. I'm still trying to understand how the hell it can possibly be a vase mode spiralyzed print. One day or the other i'll try to print some sort of aeroplane this way or maybe a blimp.

Fusion 360 has a new extrude function where you can extrude solid from a line.... This should make it even more stable in cad to design the wing

"Just winging it" - I see what you did there 😉

I think you may get better strength-to-weight if you make the circular cut-outs parallel to the ribs instead of parallel to the spar. And then they do unfortunately need to be tapered, so you might want to add the circular cutouts individually to a single rib before you replicate it.

fusion 360 has a airfoil add-on can make airfoil sketch easier, and in the file menu we got a "3d print..." option that can direct import 3mf to slicer

Thanks for saving me 3 weeks.

I think I know how Dennis must have felt when he stole the embryos in Jurassic Park..... Thanks for sharing this and saving me months of time (if I ever would have arrived here at all...)

Very cool! Going to try this.

Good job, Tim

Incredible! Thank you!

"Just winging it" 😂Love it!

This is a video I'm going to save in my favorites so that when youtube makes Portuguese dubbing available, I can watch it.

Informative, again. Thanks Tom.

Nice one Tom. Thanks a bunch.

Had a thought, not that it matters for light load usage such as RC. Could be used as a good demonstration of structures. You could aeroelastically tailor the wing by slight variations in rib angles and numbers. I like the nature behind aeroelastic tailoring because of the X-29's forward sweep where aeroelastic divergence was an issue and composite tailoring mitigated this. You could do the same here.

Thank you. This was really good!

You can also use Fusion 360 addon called "airfoil dat to spline" and get the shape imported from airfoil tools automatically without the need for manual sketching

Tim, you can skip a step there and send the body directly to prusaslicer using the 3d Print option instead of exporting as .stl. You have to setup your slicer as the custom slicer first, but that is just pointing Fusion to the .exe of prusaslicer. No more export - import - export - import

Hi Tom. Thank you thank you thank you. I'm an avid model plane builder and 3D printer. My electronic drafting skills are woeful😆 I've watched many tutorials and found them quite hard to follow. Even though you were going through the steps fast pause and rewind fix that. 👍👍👍

Only one thing for reasoning. Your printing time is 8 hours. In the company I'am working, we make wings like yours. We were making it like you by 3d printing, but it was very long for us. Now we are making it from flat plates and just a paper as a shell. All parts are being cut by laser cut and now it takes us only 5 minutes to make 1 wing including cutting and assemble. So, try to use laser cutting, it's very useful to save you time.

Absolute brilliance

Yes! Love to see more fusion stuff

Superb Tom.