"The Crossfire" 3D printed quadcopter - Part 4 - Sketching & Printing

One of the things that came up with my test print, was that the screw holes on the ends of the arms did not match up with the screw holes on the motors I got.

Not to worry, though. The designer has provided the SketchUp files for all the parts on the quad, so that adjustments to the files can be made. SketchUp is a free, easy to use design program.

http://www.sketchup.com/

If you've never used it before, there are some great tutorial videos to help you get started...

http://www.sketchup.com/learn

 I loaded the the arm into SketchUp and moved the holes around to where I needed them. To see whether or not I had them in the right place, I didn't want to print an entire arm, so I took just the surface with the screw holes in it, copied it to a separate file, made it 2mm thick and printed a small disk that I could test with my motors. It's a good thing I did that, I printed about 4 of these disks before I finally got it right. The screw holes positions in the motors are not exactly uniform, and I ended up making the holes slightly oval shaped.

I also went ahead a printed a new bottom plate, since the white PLA that we have is really good quality.

Now that the bottom plate is done, I've got a print going of a top plate that has the screw holes in the right position for the KK2 flight controller.

This is the file I used for the top plate, since it was the only top plate I found that seems like it won;t give me problems when I try to mount my flight controller: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:151821

I'm going to keep on printing parts, keeping the printer going almost non-stop. We are supposed to get some new PLA colors in tomorrow, so I'll most likely be able to  start printing the arms, which I plan to do in black. I also got some hardware in to test the electronics. (servo cables, EC5 connectors, etc)

Stay tuned.