Micro Wing 440mm

Introduction:

While I was building my first wing, I came across videos of people building micro wings. This naturally piqued my interest and I knew I wanted to build one. As I was browsing through some chuck gliders on banggood one day, I came across a hand thrown flying wing and I thought it may be possible to convert it to a RC. Unfortunately, when it arrived, it was all crumpled up and was more or less garbage. I'm not sure it would have worked anyway since the foam on the hand thrown version was too thin. I later decided to make one out of dollar tree foam board instead.

Components ($30):

• 2x Hobbyking 15318B servos
• Racerstar BR1103 8000kv motor
• Racerstar A1S 3A Blheli 1S esc
• 4 channel micro receiver
• 2x Push rods
• 1 sheet Dollar tree foam board

Conclusion:

The build was rather simple and straight forward. To cut down on weight, I used the lightest components I had on hand. The motor and esc together were under 5 grams. The servos were a little over 2 grams each. The foam was dollar tree foam board with the paper removed to save weight. I taped over the whole thing with colored packing tape to give it strength. There's a bamboo skewer running the span of the wing right on the CG line. To make it impact resistant on the nose, there is a toothpick running from the nose to the bamboo skewer. The motor was mounted on a piece of plastic cut from a tofu container. If you've read my other builds, you'll notice by now that I only source my build materials from foods high in protein. ;) The wing came to a total of 30 grams (w/o battery).

What can I say except that this is a little demon. Version 1 never flew well because the elevons were too small, the prop was undersized, and the motor was inadvertently mounted at a slight angle which took me many crashes to figure out. Despite its size, this thing can fly quick (and slow). With the many mistakes I made in the build, the one thing I did do correctly the first time were the structural reinforcements. Dollar tree foam board is not exactly known for surviving crashes. Small planes do handle crashes better than their larger counterparts due to lower weight, but this little guy was every bit as durable as my larger EPP wing. It's done nose first landings in everything from asphalt to concrete and it came out unscathed. The motor is pretty scratched up, but that's really about it. It can roll well, but loops are difficult unless you have a lot of altitude since the elevators do not seem to be aerodynamically efficient.

As I'm not completely satisfied with its flight characteristics, I am very likely going to build another one by reshaping this wing.

Update with version 1.2 (5/31/2017) - This now finally flies like a good wing. From the video, there are still adjustments to be made to the trim and also motor thrust angle since it tends to climb during acceleration. However, no more changes are going to be made to this particular wing since the elevons are still a design flaw. A good lesson was learned from this regarding the importance of the size of vertical stabilizers (fins). Without a large enough stabilizer, the wing will fly very squirrelly.

Update - This wing was finally retired after accidentally plugging it into a 2s battery while measuring thrust on different planes. The components which were salvageable were moved to the Micro wing v4.