Cheap PVC pipe multi-rotor frame

Because my first bought quadcopter frame (which was suppose to be super strong) kept on breaking arms after every minor crash (even a hard landing was enough to snap an arm), I thought that building a better frame myself would be not too hard. Wood is probably still one of the best materials for your booms but PVC pipe is a good alternative. I’m talking about the 16mm yellow pipe which is uses (here in the Netherlands) for the electrical wiring in houses.

PVC pipe has a lot of advantages:

1. Very strong - not unbreakable but I doubt that you can crash a multicopter so hard is will break.
2. Cheap - you can buy a full length of 4 meters for less than two euro's.
3. Light - which is just a good thing, right?
4. It can flex a bit - because of that it absorbs a lot of the vibrations from the motors.
5. hollow - you can lead the motor wires through it and make it all nice and tidy

The disadvantages:
1. Because the pipes can flex you should not go crazy on the size of your multicopter. The longer the arms the more they flex which makes the multicopter fly sluggish and not so edgy and pristine.
2. The round pipes make it hard to mount the motors.

Now I could say that I like simplicity and stuff but the fact is that I am lazy and I don't want to go over the hassle of making complicates motor mounts that just add more weight. So, after I saw a video of Hallstudio about building a simple tricopter (check out his videos on YouTube, he is awesome). I decided to just tape and tie the motors directly to the PVC pipes.

So I just use double sided sticky tape and tie-wraps. That worked actually quit good most of the times.

Later I used these brackets which added a bit more tightness. The motors can move a little bit but that doesn't seem to affect the flying. 

To mount the arms on to the middle piece u uses SOM brackets. There are normally use for mounting electrical cables on the wall but the 16 mm pipe's fit just perfectly. These brackets cost about 10 to 15 euro per 50 ps. mine didn’t cost me anything because there old used ones, as you can see. 

Bear in mind that I was not concerned about making a pretty and sleek multirotor (which is pretty obvious), this is more of an experimental platform, still in its test and develop faze (hence the wing nuts). It is not hard to see that this was originally a quadcopter. I pushed the front arms a bit back and the back arms a bit together and twisted them about 45 degrees to the outside. Of course I had to drill new holes and rearrange the whole thing but it all went pretty quick and easy. To my own surprise it flew actually not that bad. First I used 9X47 blades for all four motors but later I mounted 10X45 props on the front motors and left the 9X47 on the back motors which made it even fly better.

The landing gear is taped (double sided sticky tape) and tied (tie-wraps). The KK2.0 is taped into its own casing and the casing is taped to the middle piece.

I used the V-tail for some agricultural activities. 

I'm an absolute beginner pilot but this V-tail lets itself really throw around. I like the aggressive yaw. It’s probably even better than on a tricopter. Somehow I see the V-tail as the loud and mean brother of the tricopter.

Al in all I think 16 mm PVC pipe is an excellent material for quick easy and cheap building, and experimenting with, multicopters. As long as you don't make them to big (you probably shouldn’t make the arms longer than 25cm or so). It also makes it possible to build a real neat and clean-cut multicopter. Which I obviously did not.