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[–] 141 points 10 months ago (3 children)

This is called the Jesus nut. It holds the main rotor onto the helicopter. It doesn’t have any redundancy, so if it fails, you’re going to be meeting Jesus in moments.

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  • [–] 82 points 10 months ago (13 children)

    I printed an ABS powerwheels gear out for a friend to test the fit. 100% infill, tt was chonky, was going to get it redone in nylon.

    it fit and was ripped to shreds in 30 seconds :)

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    FYI: Plastic Welding is a thing that exists. Use it literally all the time to fix what my kids break.

    Power Wheel Wheel included. Takes literally seconds to fix a crack

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (8 children)
  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    At 100% infill, it's all wall. Though the better bet is probably using the printed part to make a mold.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Not sure, might be different. Like the infill might go side to side but walls go up and down. So increasing walls might still give more strength.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago

    it's a gear, so you need the layers to be perpendicular to the rotation to give it a chance, but the final drive interface came up off the gear like a tophat. It was not a good candidate for FDM. Realistically, it wasn't a good candidate for resin either. The tophat really needed to be metal with an interface into resin or nylon for the gear to gear surfaces.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    nah there's a difference in print line orientation on all the slicers I've used. When printing functional parts like that, especially mechanical ones, you really got to pay attention to printing orientations

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    For a use case like this it would be a good use case to do 3D printed casting.

    3D print the part. Mold out of silicon. Then make the final part in resin.

    Or just buy the real part.

    There's also ways to make plastic parts via injection at home.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Resin was one of my early thoughts. The original Nylon is pretty tough, and they kept breaking gears. (I think he was overvolting it) He tried replacement boxes but they just broke immediately, he managed to get a couple of original gears at $80 a piece, but they didn't last long either.

    I think the right answer would have been to replace the motor with something that had a higher Kv and done a belt drive. (like electric skate parts with a little more ratio)

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Yeah, even annealing it didn't help much. I think the original part of the injection-molded nylon was a bit under-specified.

    It would have been a good project for metal, but it would have been 4 years in the box and cost more than the original ride-on.

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  • [–] 237 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Not needing food or shelter anymore because you're dead is also great for your budget.

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  • [–] 32 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Going out with a bang is great for everybody’s budget!

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  • [+] 72 points 10 months ago (12 children)
  • [–] 52 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    People think private pilots are rich because airplanes are expensive. They're not - they might be upper-middle class (with a mortgage and other debt) but most have to budget their aviation spending. Truly wealthy people don't fly their own planes, they hire pilots and crew, and probably have no idea what a Jesus nut looks like.

    That said, this is obviously satire/bait.

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  • [–] 43 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    I know the post is a joke but it's more like "somebody owns a helicopter rental business and they're bitching about repairs on helicopters they themselves don't pilot so they themselves aren't in danger"

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  • [–] 21 points 10 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 14 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    The etymology of helicopter is actually a compound word divided in an unexpected place:

    • "Helico" means rotating or spiral.
    • "Pter" means wing, as in the word "pterodactyl."

    So if we're gonna bring that into another compound word, we should probably chop it in the right place: pterlord.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago*

    Aerolord.

    I just realized we will probably have aerolords in a couple decades. I should invest in clean air and stockpile it. Maybe it's my chance to be a lord. I'm going to need a compound, barbed wire, and machineguns too. Shit, it's a lot of work being a lord. I think I'll just pay for an air subscription.

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  • [–] 63 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    And now you've just given Boeing executives some great ideas how to further reduce costs! I don't thank you!!

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  • [–] 18 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    I have news for you:
    3D printing is very common in the aviation industry by now.
    They don't exactly use TPU and Bambulab printers, though... ;-)

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  • [–] 56 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Big Helicopter hates this one weird trick:

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  • [–] 32 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Wasn’t there a news story recently where someone had actually done this and (obviously) died?

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago

    I think it was an airplane air inlet duct that melted and collapsed. And it was bought from a 3D printing supplier, not printed themselves. The person aboard lived. So it was more subtle, which makes it even more insidious. I.e. even for a simple plastic tube you need the expensive part, for non-obvious reasons.

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  • [–] 27 points 10 months ago

    One time, this was back in my skydiving days so a very long time ago, the drop zone's CASA 212 was down due to a bad hydraulic pump. The pump finally arrived and the DZO asked me to help him install it. He was a certified A&P, I just had a lot of experience wrenching on cars but it allowed me to get a lot of free jumps due to helping him out on things like this.

    He handed me the pump, which was a LOT lighter than I expected and told me with a smile: "Don't drop it."

    In inquired as to how much it cost and he replied: "$10,000."

    I was holding a pump in my hands that weighed barely 10 pounds that cost more than my car (this was circa 1998 or so).

    A couple years later the igniter box on the port engine died and I helped him replace it... That was a cool $15000. The engines were about $250,000 a piece back in those days.

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  • [–] 27 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 26 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Is that why those two helicopters crashed into each other in New Jersey?

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  • [–] 25 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    You are ready to own an airplane if you can wake up in the morning, burn a $100 bill and flush it down the toilet without feeling anything.

    You are ready to own a helicopter when you can do the same thing, except with ten $100 bills.

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  • [+] 24 points 10 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 22 points 10 months ago (8 children)

    Ok, i'll bite: 3D print... in what material?

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  • [–] 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    If it only cost pennies to print it's not strong enough.

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  • [–] 20 points 10 months ago (8 children)

    Of course it's a joke, but I am genuinely curious about why the 3d printed part looks so shitty.

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago

    1590? Actually not even a bad price

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Sounds about as based as using a madcatz controller to pilot a deep sea submersible.

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  • [–] 14 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    It was a Logitech F710. Their mistake was not using the wired F310; much more solid and no chance of wireless interference causing input lag or accidental implosion.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Also, what's wrong with a controller? It's just another input, and a decent one for the use case. Could they have gotten a more expensive, proprietary one? Probably, but it's function would be very similar. Should they have maybe locked the key bindings? Yea, I think so.

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