Aerospace manufacturing engineer here. Love the process! If you ever get to a production rate in the future where you have more than a couple aircraft in flow, you might need to create another assembly fixture. When you do that, just make triple sure that it matches the original fixture as closely as possible. Even though you’ve done everything you can to retain dimensional accuracy, every aircraft built on it will inevitably make changes. So if you ever need to duplicate it, invest in a laser scan to make sure your new assembly fixture matches as closely as possible.
As others have said, I would love to see how you are bonding the spars/ribs/grid to the skins. What testing have you done to validate this approach and what mitigation do you have for cracked or damaged bonds?
When is this coming to MS Flight Simulator 2020? I want a long range high speed plane for FS!! Give your plans to a developer. They'll likely do it for free under a revenue sharing system. Will provide future buyers with a toy until they have their real plane and also a training aid.
@@Smokkedandslammed He ignored a ton of warning signs, didn't focus on weight, ended up like 900lbs over design weight and eventually crashed it due to a very predictable engine design failure. He was fine. Plane and dream were dead.
Great content, you guys are on a mission and what you do is an inspiration to a lot of us viewers. Your rigour is outstanding and I also appreciate the efforts you go to to share and explain the inner workings of the project to us. You are some good people 🙂
I worked as a Manufacturing Engineer at Boeing 1979 through 1990 on various projects but the 747 was one. It is gratifying to see manufacturing getting it's due. Elon has said designing Tesla cars was easy, the Manufacturering system was the hard part. Carbon fiber was before my time but it's really no different from a build perspective than fiberglass. Key thing here is bonding the rib structure pieces to the skins and other components together into a single assembly. Would really like to see much more detail on how that is done. Verification of adequate bonding material but not too much (weight penalty). Will every wing assembly be static tested to design load due to variability in your assembly process? Would like to hear these issues addressed. Great project and video series!
I second this request. It's definitely easy to CNC the 100-200 "flat" parts of the ribs/shear-web/internal structure, but this choice creates the new problem of assembling that 3D jigsaw puzzle. Assembling that with precision and reliability across the hundreds of epoxy joints/interfaces sounds very difficult and laborious. Any plans to automate/streamline that?
I'd also like to see how they accurately tracked and forecast/estimated weights. The Raptor project is a great illustration as to how this can go so, so, so wrong. Just a bit more here and a bit more there, then suddenly you have something that can't carry passengers.
@@nathanchalecki4842 Since they have the entire airplane in CAD all they have to do is assign a material to each part. CAD knows the volume of each part, the density of the material and can then calculate the mass. It can even give you the CG of the whole assembly.
@@ulbuilder I know that much :-), however it can be difficult to translate the cad model into layers of cf, liters of resin, adhesive to bond components, etc etc
Great breakdown of the process. Finding the time to attend your composite course is proving difficult, but it is getting close to the top of my to-do list
This has been fantastic to see how things are done behind the scenes as you all progress further and further. I know I don't speak for myself when I say I very much appreciate it the extra effort to document the process and share it with us!!! I'm so excited for your company.
I love the color scheme of the Dark Aero on your screensaver. Looks fantastic. Can’t wait to see it. Please consider partnering with Horizon Hobby so they can make an RC version of the Dark Aero.
As I do various consulting and design jobs in the electronics industry, I see this exact issue as well. A lot of people and companies simply don't want to think about how their product is going to get built, and it's seen as a problem for "someone else" to figure out later, despite it always circling back to the original design team to slap them around when deadlines start to hit. Onshape is going to bite you down the line though.
@@vladstr100 You own nothing, it's all on their servers, and relies on you still having an account and having full access to the internet at all times. If they decide to ban you, or you lose internet access, or can't recover the password, everything you've ever designed is gone. It's a really shitty business practice, putting it all in a browser. Same with fusion360.
@@Spirit532 Ah yeah, I guess that's true. I'd hope they'd seriously work with those professionals to recover accounts and whatnot if it ever got to that point. Nice thing about Onshape I hear is it's easiest to collaborate with a team compared to SOLIDWORKS like I've been using for my senior design as an aerospace engineering student. We've been designing a supersonic business jet, so all the parts files have been on my computer and backed up on Google Drive for redundancy and easy of sharing parts and assemblies with my team.
@@vladstr100 Designing a business jet in SW is a bit masochistic. For complex multidisciplinary designs like that you would usually use Siemens NX with TeamCenter for versioning, management, and sharing - or whatever combo Dassault offers with Catia(but worse).
@@Spirit532 It's definitely been a pain in the ass but that's the software we get access to from the school. The CAD model is actually coming together pretty nicely, at least from a surface level view
I don't understand why you don't do the maiden flight and flight test first. You will surely have to make changes to the plane and molds. Of course you always have the production in mind, but one step at a time. Otherwise, I think the whole project and your videos are great
Hi Riley, great video as usual. The technical details shown are very interesting for anyone interested in engineering ☺️. 2 questions I have: How many wings do you estimate that you can build per day/week with this setup? How many wings in total can you build before the mold needs to be replaced or overhauled? Thanks again for posting these great videos. Keep em coming and good luck with preparations for the first flight!
So you guys inspired to get into making. Over the last year been learning everything around electronics, cnc, 3d printing, polyurethane casting, etc. In fact, this week I am moving out of my room in my apartment I have been using as a make shift studio, into a workshop, so can start really working with more complex materials and techniques. Seeing your mold pattern making for a plane opened my eyes to what can be made with CNC machines and a lot of the modern tools available now. If you can make an actual plane with readily available tools (and a lot of knowledge) then surely can make anything. It's the knowledge part I am lacking. Thanks for this.
Really good presentation. You've made a massive investment in the moulds. I hope you don't decide to make any changes to your prototype, it will turn the moulds into junk. You'd have to have a ton of confidence in your design before doing all this. Ballsy.
Hreat to learn about co-curing! I’m really enjoying how clearly you articulate your design choices and your design journey. Inspiring and fascinating. Im really looking forward to your next video!
Sir, I am really fascinated to see some solid concepts required in oth designing and material manufacturing. Thank you for showing this. May be not all of us can visit an aircraft production hangar and see it ourselves. Your videos are the one that drove me to choose aircraft design as a master subject.
It's so inspiring the way you organize every process in the making of the dark aero 1, including knowledge keeping and sharing. From the perspective that you share, it seems like you have gone through the right path of managing resources (money) from the beginning of the design while working until the idea of production prototyping the first aircraft. You "spend" time on sharing that process, but at the same time you create fans and future customers, while building the capability to meet the demand you are creating. I would love to know what are the principles you apply on project management what is the grand scheme of all the process you initiated and keep moving from the beginning, including content creating, production of courses, resource management, actually prototyping an aircraft and the negotiation of a supply chain for production period. Maybe that's asking too much rsrs
Great work; I've been following your development and I'm impressed with the technical design work you have accomplished. As a design mechanical engineer I'm curious why your wing has no diagonals in each of the rectangles as this would greatly increase wing stiffness.
Really great tour of the wing manufacturing processes. Could you in another video talk about the wings' innards? Control lines, mechanical movements (ailerons, flaps), fuel tanks, and so forth? Thanks!
Hey guys, I am really impresses by the quality of your content! What would you say are the worst shortcomings of onshape in contrast to solidworks or siemens NX?
Another excellent discussion, thank you! Can you provide a guesstimate of the production time you expect will be involved in producing each wing set, and how that compares with traditional kitplane wing manufacturing? Also, can you make the same comparison for the time investment required by your kit customers vs a comparably sized typical composite kit?
I hope you keep carbon fiber filaments away from your workers lungs and eyes. All it takes is to have an employee sue your company because of carbon fiber ingestion/inhalation which can bring your manufacturing process to a standstill.
11:20 - Company sounds pretty legit. Carbon composite wings with internally bonded... ribs? spars? lateral bulkhead? What kind of inspections? Some form of ultrasound?
How do you prevent tiny pinholes in the bonding fillets from letting fuel into the exposed shear web cells? In my experience it's hard to get perfect watertight bonds EVERYWHERE
Hey guys! Regarding the painting, would it be possible to have a final paint layer that is UV opaque but transparent to visible spectrum? Even if only some of the visible light gets through, the carbon fiber looks would be amazing.
You guys should team up and launch a RC model version, help advertise aircraft, bring in some more immediate income, it seemed to work for Mike Patey's DRACO
Not a CAD but a computer generated rendering of a parasolid = parametric solid 3D model. You can generate infinite amounts of CAD from a parasolid model with few mouse clicks, quite the chore to turn CAD into a parasolid. Yes yes call me names. I just think its important to get the basic terminology right.
I was just wondering. I look at your design and it's exceedingly sleek, but after teaching physics for so long and looking at the industry designs, I am wondering, Why did you choose cut-hard-corner-type angles for everything. The rudder is not a smooth transition from the fuselage. I need info on this one. Keep up the hard work.
Do you guys route your plumbing and harnesses in Onshape? The space company I work for wants to use Onshape but from what I've seen routing is a nightmare. Am I missing something?
Im abot xonfused by the main message from your channel. Your goal is to create an airplane which coukd be created from th your garage. Vut after seeing a couple vidoee and all you massive hardware, that goal seems impossible. Its looks like a couple million funding project. The hardware alone seems massive. Did i miss some vidoe or are all these massive hardware toops for ironing out the main workflow
You mention that the wing mould (and hence the wing) has no twist. Aircraft normally have some twist to the wing, known as a variable angle of incidence. This allows the wing to stall at the root first so the ailerons remain effective during the stall. Did you consider this?
Maintainability seems like a really big concern. Pretty much any minute component can be repaired in aviation. If someone clips a wing on this thing pulling it out of the hangar, are they going to need a full wing structure to fix it?
Why don't you experiment by making an airplane engine with a propeller like an Airbus or Boeing for a type of design for more variants of aircraft for one or more passengers?
Dimensional accuracy is increased by using the same material for the molds and the parts. As you heat and cool the mold it will expand and contract at the same rate as the part. I helped make heaters for fiberglass molds that made fiberglass passenger airplane interior panels.
We actually started with designing the aircraft in Solidworks. We switched over to Onshape because it gave us the ability to all work on the design of the aircraft without needing to purchase multiple CAD based computer stations and it had a built in PDM system. We also liked that we didn't have to download any software or worry about keeping up with the latest license releases. We've made a few videos on our experience using it, but this one gives a good overview: ruclips.net/video/XBdI_xZaiks/видео.html
Riley and Brothers have a Happy Holidays. It is so cool that you looking ahead and doing a Awesome job. How Much Cheaper are your Molds comparing to Aluminum Molds ? Just thinking of Building a American make F5J sailplane. Thanks. Peace Be With You
Absolutely awesome educational lecture! Look forward to flying your plane soon! I am involved in superlight electric helicopters, would be great to have a conversation regarding blade production!
Amazing, I do not like just one item- using aluminum(metal) together with carbon. It could have been all plastic and no one would have to worry about fatigue and corrosion in future. Just my opinion. I do not think, that aluminum was the key component to make it lighter or stronger compare to all plastic construction.
I have seen larger aircraft with the carbon fiber not laid evenly. You're right wing didn't come out as well as you had hoped. It's better. Test me when you know more. I would rather this be a design flaw to build something excellent!
I wonder if you explored different types of bracing in the wing.... you might be able to remove weight and material with cross bracing, or a cardboard type infill.
Impressive and interesting. Personally I would want something heavier/more rigid than aluminum T-slot, and more fixturing to while in the oven, but I understand this is still the early stages.
The tooling is good, OK for a skin as such But show me your main-spar. If it is a load bearing skin how do you transfer the tension loads from the lower wing skin over the hump of the lower fuselage?
Could you elaborate on what material production molds will be made of? For the aircraft material itself had you chosen flax weave material would your weight and spar support areas added quite a bit of weight to the final aircraft? I understand there are some tensile issues, but as far as the infusion process, would it have been more cumbersome?
I really love this channel and the dark aero concept. Have you thought on using reusable silicon membranes instead of the vacuum bagging? I worked with that tech on the past and I think it is game changer for composites. You can check Alan Harper Composites, it is not cheap for starting but for mass production it will save you lot of time and money. Keep doing this videos!! Regards
What steps are you taking to make the Dark Aero 1 maintenance friendly? I would hate to see this airplane get on the market and not do well because of cost prohibitive/labor intensive maintenance procedures.
Hi, what bond line are you maintaining between the skins and shear webs. Also process are you using to check it prior to final skin bonding and close out. Have done very similar work and very much enjoy watching your project. Thanks
Aerospace manufacturing engineer here. Love the process! If you ever get to a production rate in the future where you have more than a couple aircraft in flow, you might need to create another assembly fixture. When you do that, just make triple sure that it matches the original fixture as closely as possible.
Even though you’ve done everything you can to retain dimensional accuracy, every aircraft built on it will inevitably make changes. So if you ever need to duplicate it, invest in a laser scan to make sure your new assembly fixture matches as closely as possible.
As others have said, I would love to see how you are bonding the spars/ribs/grid to the skins. What testing have you done to validate this approach and what mitigation do you have for cracked or damaged bonds?
interested in this too
Agreed. Once the lower skin is bonded, how would you address a disbond discovered by NDI?
When is this coming to MS Flight Simulator 2020? I want a long range high speed plane for FS!! Give your plans to a developer. They'll likely do it for free under a revenue sharing system. Will provide future buyers with a toy until they have their real plane and also a training aid.
You and Mike Patey have restored my faith in the future of aviation after watching the Raptor debacle. 😎
I haven't seen any of his videos in a while, what happened with the Raptor? That thing was so cool lol
@@Smokkedandslammed He ignored a ton of warning signs, didn't focus on weight, ended up like 900lbs over design weight and eventually crashed it due to a very predictable engine design failure. He was fine. Plane and dream were dead.
@codyhaynes5680 Oh dang! I remember him wanting to use dual MoTec and people giving him crap about it. I guess I have some catching up to do lol
Unfamiliar with the Raptor project you refer too. Can you provide the channel? Thx.
@@Smokkedandslammedchoice of engine management systems was the least of the problem s
Great content, you guys are on a mission and what you do is an inspiration to a lot of us viewers. Your rigour is outstanding and I also appreciate the efforts you go to to share and explain the inner workings of the project to us. You are some good people 🙂
How do you repair a 24ft continuous piece of CF when it's damaged?
I worked as a Manufacturing Engineer at Boeing 1979 through 1990 on various projects but the 747 was one. It is gratifying to see manufacturing getting it's due. Elon has said designing Tesla cars was easy, the Manufacturering system was the hard part. Carbon fiber was before my time but it's really no different from a build perspective than fiberglass. Key thing here is bonding the rib structure pieces to the skins and other components together into a single assembly. Would really like to see much more detail on how that is done. Verification of adequate bonding material but not too much (weight penalty). Will every wing assembly be static tested to design load due to variability in your assembly process? Would like to hear these issues addressed. Great project and video series!
I second this request. It's definitely easy to CNC the 100-200 "flat" parts of the ribs/shear-web/internal structure, but this choice creates the new problem of assembling that 3D jigsaw puzzle. Assembling that with precision and reliability across the hundreds of epoxy joints/interfaces sounds very difficult and laborious. Any plans to automate/streamline that?
I'd also like to see how they accurately tracked and forecast/estimated weights. The Raptor project is a great illustration as to how this can go so, so, so wrong. Just a bit more here and a bit more there, then suddenly you have something that can't carry passengers.
@@nathanchalecki4842 Since they have the entire airplane in CAD all they have to do is assign a material to each part. CAD knows the volume of each part, the density of the material and can then calculate the mass. It can even give you the CG of the whole assembly.
@@ulbuilder I know that much :-), however it can be difficult to translate the cad model into layers of cf, liters of resin, adhesive to bond components, etc etc
@@nathanchalecki4842 it's more art than science until you develop enough data to predict anything.
Great breakdown of the process. Finding the time to attend your composite course is proving difficult, but it is getting close to the top of my to-do list
Thank you for taking us along Riley! I have learned a lot from watching you guys design and build the aircraft and the processes for replicating it.
This has been fantastic to see how things are done behind the scenes as you all progress further and further. I know I don't speak for myself when I say I very much appreciate it the extra effort to document the process and share it with us!!! I'm so excited for your company.
I love the color scheme of the Dark Aero on your screensaver. Looks fantastic. Can’t wait to see it. Please consider partnering with Horizon Hobby so they can make an RC version of the Dark Aero.
This video should be training material for every new design engineer, and maybe the old ones too. Great job guys!
As I do various consulting and design jobs in the electronics industry, I see this exact issue as well. A lot of people and companies simply don't want to think about how their product is going to get built, and it's seen as a problem for "someone else" to figure out later, despite it always circling back to the original design team to slap them around when deadlines start to hit.
Onshape is going to bite you down the line though.
I'm curious what you mean by Onshape is going to bite them down the line?
@@vladstr100 You own nothing, it's all on their servers, and relies on you still having an account and having full access to the internet at all times. If they decide to ban you, or you lose internet access, or can't recover the password, everything you've ever designed is gone. It's a really shitty business practice, putting it all in a browser. Same with fusion360.
@@Spirit532 Ah yeah, I guess that's true. I'd hope they'd seriously work with those professionals to recover accounts and whatnot if it ever got to that point. Nice thing about Onshape I hear is it's easiest to collaborate with a team compared to SOLIDWORKS like I've been using for my senior design as an aerospace engineering student.
We've been designing a supersonic business jet, so all the parts files have been on my computer and backed up on Google Drive for redundancy and easy of sharing parts and assemblies with my team.
@@vladstr100 Designing a business jet in SW is a bit masochistic. For complex multidisciplinary designs like that you would usually use Siemens NX with TeamCenter for versioning, management, and sharing - or whatever combo Dassault offers with Catia(but worse).
@@Spirit532 It's definitely been a pain in the ass but that's the software we get access to from the school. The CAD model is actually coming together pretty nicely, at least from a surface level view
I don't understand why you don't do the maiden flight and flight test first. You will surely have to make changes to the plane and molds. Of course you always have the production in mind, but one step at a time. Otherwise, I think the whole project and your videos are great
Hi Riley, great video as usual. The technical details shown are very interesting for anyone interested in engineering ☺️.
2 questions I have:
How many wings do you estimate that you can build per day/week with this setup?
How many wings in total can you build before the mold needs to be replaced or overhauled?
Thanks again for posting these great videos. Keep em coming and good luck with preparations for the first flight!
10 years down the road can this wing be easily inspected for cracks or defects?
So you guys inspired to get into making. Over the last year been learning everything around electronics, cnc, 3d printing, polyurethane casting, etc. In fact, this week I am moving out of my room in my apartment I have been using as a make shift studio, into a workshop, so can start really working with more complex materials and techniques. Seeing your mold pattern making for a plane opened my eyes to what can be made with CNC machines and a lot of the modern tools available now. If you can make an actual plane with readily available tools (and a lot of knowledge) then surely can make anything. It's the knowledge part I am lacking. Thanks for this.
Really good presentation. You've made a massive investment in the moulds. I hope you don't decide to make any changes to your prototype, it will turn the moulds into junk. You'd have to have a ton of confidence in your design before doing all this. Ballsy.
Nice this multibeam design is better for torsional strength and avoid flutter on entire wing👍
Hreat to learn about co-curing!
I’m really enjoying how clearly you articulate your design choices and your design journey. Inspiring and fascinating. Im really looking forward to your next video!
I want one... And a four+ seat version. :-)
Sir, I am really fascinated to see some solid concepts required in oth designing and material manufacturing. Thank you for showing this. May be not all of us can visit an aircraft production hangar and see it ourselves. Your videos are the one that drove me to choose aircraft design as a master subject.
It's so inspiring the way you organize every process in the making of the dark aero 1, including knowledge keeping and sharing. From the perspective that you share, it seems like you have gone through the right path of managing resources (money) from the beginning of the design while working until the idea of production prototyping the first aircraft. You "spend" time on sharing that process, but at the same time you create fans and future customers, while building the capability to meet the demand you are creating. I would love to know what are the principles you apply on project management what is the grand scheme of all the process you initiated and keep moving from the beginning, including content creating, production of courses, resource management, actually prototyping an aircraft and the negotiation of a supply chain for production period. Maybe that's asking too much rsrs
I wanna know where they are getting the money to fund all this
@@comicahmetVenture Capital
Get laid. The brother's don't have Tinder yet. 12 points of Lucas says I am staring at a Max Lucado booklet.
Great work; I've been following your development and I'm impressed with the technical design work you have accomplished.
As a design mechanical engineer I'm curious why your wing has no diagonals in each of the rectangles as this would greatly increase wing stiffness.
I would expect diagonals to be covered by skin layup with +-45° layers.
Really great tour of the wing manufacturing processes. Could you in another video talk about the wings' innards? Control lines, mechanical movements (ailerons, flaps), fuel tanks, and so forth? Thanks!
Hey guys, I am really impresses by the quality of your content! What would you say are the worst shortcomings of onshape in contrast to solidworks or siemens NX?
Fascinating video, you’re an excellent communicator, thanks for documenting this project
Another excellent discussion, thank you!
Can you provide a guesstimate of the production time you expect will be involved in producing each wing set, and how that compares with traditional kitplane wing manufacturing?
Also, can you make the same comparison for the time investment required by your kit customers vs a comparably sized typical composite kit?
Awesome. You can make as many videos as you want I guarantee you'd get thousands of views on all of them. This is top notch stuff. Keep it up!!
can't wait to see this thing fly.
I totally forgot that you guys BUILT AN INDUSTRIAL GRADE AUTOCLAVE. Jesus Christ lol. Talk about doing things in-house!
Great video as per usual. Can't wait for the next one.
Do you have to replace the whole wing if there's small area damage?
Yea I'm worried about this
Hangar rash happens.
I hope you keep carbon fiber filaments away from your workers lungs and eyes. All it takes is to have an employee sue your
company because of carbon fiber ingestion/inhalation which can bring your manufacturing process to a standstill.
so the ribs and the stringers are just glued edge of the plate on the skin like we glue a plate on a honeycomb?
11:20 - Company sounds pretty legit. Carbon composite wings with internally bonded... ribs? spars? lateral bulkhead? What kind of inspections? Some form of ultrasound?
What is the purpose of this elegant airplane? Prototype? Experimental? Racing? Record breaking? What will it be used for when it is completed?
total failure of design....totally impractical except for a few pilots...should have been slightly bigger for increased cargo
How do you prevent tiny pinholes in the bonding fillets from letting fuel into the exposed shear web cells? In my experience it's hard to get perfect watertight bonds EVERYWHERE
Hey guys! Regarding the painting, would it be possible to have a final paint layer that is UV opaque but transparent to visible spectrum? Even if only some of the visible light gets through, the carbon fiber looks would be amazing.
Wrap with carbon look-alike?
You guys should team up and launch a RC model version, help advertise aircraft, bring in some more immediate income, it seemed to work for Mike Patey's DRACO
Cheers, the best channel of manufacturing... Jesus, What a bunch of guys very smart toguether....
Not a CAD but a computer generated rendering of a parasolid = parametric solid 3D model.
You can generate infinite amounts of CAD from a parasolid model with few mouse clicks, quite the chore to turn CAD into a parasolid.
Yes yes call me names. I just think its important to get the basic terminology right.
I was just wondering. I look at your design and it's exceedingly sleek, but after teaching physics for so long and looking at the industry designs, I am wondering, Why did you choose cut-hard-corner-type angles for everything. The rudder is not a smooth transition from the fuselage. I need info on this one. Keep up the hard work.
Do you guys route your plumbing and harnesses in Onshape? The space company I work for wants to use Onshape but from what I've seen routing is a nightmare. Am I missing something?
great vid on wing, i would like to see compairable vid on fuselage THANX!
Im abot xonfused by the main message from your channel. Your goal is to create an airplane which coukd be created from th your garage. Vut after seeing a couple vidoee and all you massive hardware, that goal seems impossible. Its looks like a couple million funding project. The hardware alone seems massive. Did i miss some vidoe or are all these massive hardware toops for ironing out the main workflow
You are 40 years late with your facts. Check yourself. Composites have been used for planes for more decades than this guy has been alive.
You guys are awesome, like the Wright brothers but modern day. Build a flying car.
PLEASE! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, FLY THIS THING ALREADY! We can't wait!
You spoke of painting the aircraft. Why not just spray gel coat on the mold then do your lay ups and vacuum bag??
You mention that the wing mould (and hence the wing) has no twist. Aircraft normally have some twist to the wing, known as a variable angle of incidence. This allows the wing to stall at the root first so the ailerons remain effective during the stall. Did you consider this?
Maintainability seems like a really big concern. Pretty much any minute component can be repaired in aviation. If someone clips a wing on this thing pulling it out of the hangar, are they going to need a full wing structure to fix it?
Why don't you experiment by making an airplane engine with a propeller like an Airbus or Boeing for a type of design for more variants of aircraft for one or more passengers?
I’m not so sure that post-curing a secondary bonded structure should be called co-curing….
What is the potential market price point? You should be making mini drones for skunk Works :)
Why segment the spar? Wouldn't it be stronger if it was run full length? or at least some of them?
Shit yeah, you made your own oven! Lazy engineers buy ovens. Good engineers just make the damn thing.
This presentation was incredibly interesting!
Looking forward to the first flight
Isn't this supposed to be buildable in your garage?
Dimensional accuracy is increased by using the same material for the molds and the parts. As you heat and cool the mold it will expand and contract at the same rate as the part. I helped make heaters for fiberglass molds that made fiberglass passenger airplane interior panels.
Great Job! Make sure you get some financial Guy on Board.
Out of curiousty what are your firms reasons for using onshape vs solidworks or other similar cad software?
We actually started with designing the aircraft in Solidworks. We switched over to Onshape because it gave us the ability to all work on the design of the aircraft without needing to purchase multiple CAD based computer stations and it had a built in PDM system. We also liked that we didn't have to download any software or worry about keeping up with the latest license releases. We've made a few videos on our experience using it, but this one gives a good overview: ruclips.net/video/XBdI_xZaiks/видео.html
You're making a plug, and pulling a mold from it. . . not making 2 molds. . .
Watching a new process today that will become common tomorrow!
What have you guys done for repairability r&d?
Not only are these brothers first-rate engineers in their own right, but all three are excellent teachers 👌 superb!
Guys,
totally class operation & what a sexy bird! 😎
You're going to make it. Keep up the videos.
Riley's Law. Don't leave anything to chance.
Flight tests before refining all the little bits is highly recommended.
How reliable is the perpendicular gluing? any delamination issues under repeated stress? any tough requirements for how the glue is applied. QA.
Always great informative videos
Riley and Brothers have a Happy Holidays. It is so cool that you looking ahead and doing a Awesome job. How Much Cheaper are your Molds comparing to Aluminum Molds ? Just thinking of Building a American make F5J sailplane. Thanks. Peace Be With You
The prop spinner needs a white spiral like a FW190
Absolutely awesome educational lecture!
Look forward to flying your plane soon!
I am involved in superlight electric helicopters, would be great to have a conversation regarding blade production!
Very hard to take seriously someone who wears a hat backwards
Is there a date for taxi trials and debut flight?
Good job guys thanks for sharing.
Amazing, I do not like just one item- using aluminum(metal) together with carbon. It could have been all plastic and no one would have to worry about fatigue and corrosion in future. Just my opinion. I do not think, that aluminum was the key component to make it lighter or stronger compare to all plastic construction.
Then a 2 seater costs 1 Million bucks.
I have seen larger aircraft with the carbon fiber not laid evenly. You're right wing didn't come out as well as you had hoped. It's better. Test me when you know more. I would rather this be a design flaw to build something excellent!
I wonder if you explored different types of bracing in the wing.... you might be able to remove weight and material with cross bracing, or a cardboard type infill.
Impressive and interesting. Personally I would want something heavier/more rigid than aluminum T-slot, and more fixturing to while in the oven, but I understand this is still the early stages.
Will it Cruise with 400kmh?
Then it is the best.
again just a huge round of applause.
The tooling is good, OK for a skin as such
But show me your main-spar.
If it is a load bearing skin how do you transfer the tension loads from the lower wing skin over the hump of the lower fuselage?
I’d like the design engineers at my work to watch this about DFM and how tooling is integral to design and production. Could learn a thing or many.
Really interesting thanks for sharing
Could you elaborate on what material
production molds will be made of? For the aircraft material itself had you chosen flax weave material would your weight and spar support areas added quite a bit of weight to the final aircraft? I understand there are some tensile issues, but as far as the infusion process, would it have been more cumbersome?
Looks like how some build rc planes
Someone should go back in time and show this video to that Raptor Aircraft guy...
I wish I could come and work for you for free!
I really love this channel and the dark aero concept. Have you thought on using reusable silicon membranes instead of the vacuum bagging? I worked with that tech on the past and I think it is game changer for composites. You can check Alan Harper Composites, it is not cheap for starting but for mass production it will save you lot of time and money. Keep doing this videos!! Regards
What's the estimate price going to be for a fully spec'd out version?
Approximately $200,000 with engine, avionics and wheels/tyres. Everything else is supplied.
Build RC then bigger and bigger...
What steps are you taking to make the Dark Aero 1 maintenance friendly? I would hate to see this airplane get on the market and not do well because of cost prohibitive/labor intensive maintenance procedures.
Maybe you already did this and I missed it but can you guys talk about the process of getting a project like this funded?
Hi, what bond line are you maintaining between the skins and shear webs. Also process are you using to check it prior to final skin bonding and close out. Have done very similar work and very much enjoy watching your project. Thanks