Back to my roots with RTP

[Flynn]

I am currently pursuing a somewhat 'return to my roots' theme and am building a balsa and tissue model for use with an RTP pole. I intend to power it with a couple of small brushless motors, an esc or two, a micro Rx with a single servo on the elevator.

Part of the fun is coming from lasering the parts from 1.5mm balsa sheet. I start with the free plan from AeroFred, I chose a Bristol Beaufighter because... why not! The workflow is - crop the formers one at a time in Adobe Acrobat, save the former as a .JPG, import that into LibreCAD and trace around the shape. Save that as a .DXF which I import into Vetric Aspire where I scale it to the size measured from the Acrobat crop, add the stringer cutouts, add the second half with the mirror function and tidy the shape up and finally save it as a .SVG which will import into LaserGRBL for cutting on a 3 Watt laser. I may be tempted to go for a stronger laser with a air pump option sometime but the balsa will all be 1.5mm. thats 1/16" to the imperialists so I expect to get through with a couple of passes... if not....laser upgrade time!.

The free plan from AeroFred

The part to be worked on cropped from the plan

The shape traced and the stringer locations marked

Stringer cut outs added and the shape mirrored to produce a full former

The file loaded into LaserGRBL ready for the cutting.



It's pretty time consuming but very gratifying when you see the part releasing from the balsa plank.

Anybody else still into RTP?