Christening, Cruising then Crashing the Carbon-Copter

I watched the BBC weather report with a growing sense of foreboding this morning.  A huge band of rain sweeping inexorably towards Newbury from the south coast, set to smother the whole of Berkshire under a blanket of liquid misery until Saturday lunchtime.  Nothing unusual, but particularly inopportune as I had a completed carbon copter and a suitcase full of batteries in the back seat of the car.

Luckily, the rain held off and Dr Johnson and I met up on the green to fly some multi-rotors in the blustery wind.  The Carbon-Copter performed stunningly…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv0T7PYgKS0

Make sure you stick with the video (or hit fast-forward) as there’s some cool shots of the FireGoat from the air towards the end.

A tiny bit of transmitter tinkering was required: un-reversing the rudder direction, lowering the expo on the pitch and roll axes and so on.  After that it was just a case of whacking the throttle up and grinning like a fool as the quad danced around the skies.

In the end I got too cocky - of course.  Started with some backwards and forwards stuff, then progressed to attempting some lazy 8’s at increasing speeds.  Eventually I lost it and hit the ground.  Initially I thought everything was OK with the frame but on closer inspection I found that both legs and one of the front-back braces was cracked.

Amazingly though, it still flew.  There was a noticeable twist in the frame as I lifted off, but it continued to fly brilliantly.  Of course, now that the legs were broken and my money effectively spent I had nothing to lose - the lazy eights became less and less lazy until they became simply “eights” then “vigorous eights” and finally “broken quad eights”.

Hit the floor pretty hard and the carbon rods shattered into a thousand useless shards.  Time to go home and make some more!  The carbon sheet remains intact, so the repair will just involve cutting and drilling some new legs and braces.  £5 total cost, which isn’t a million miles from the cost of fixing the aluminium copter after similar crashes.

So I had fun and I perhaps went a bit too far with the aerobatics.  The carbon quad is an unmitigated success and I have a big smile on my face.  It’s also worth remembering that I built the carbon quad for slow moving videography and FPV, so maybe “mental eights” won’t be happening again too soon!