First Scratch-Built Quadcopter

Hi All,

Here is my first scratch built quadcopter. After wanting to get into quads for a while, I decided that the best way to start was to build my own, rather than buying a ready-to-fly quad. I chose to do this rather than buy something like the Blade Nano QX, because I wanted the learning experience. I defintely enjoyed building it, and there are more quads coming in the future! 

I learnt a lot, and although it is my first quad, there were relatively few problems with it, and it flew straight away. One such problem however, was the motor mounts. The initial mounts I used were made of plywood, and were held on with zipties. These broke multiple times in flight, and I couldn't get a proper, sustained flight until I replaced them with aluminium mounts. These are yet to break. You can see the wooden mounts in one of the photos.

Because I've never really flown quads before this, I can't really judge whether this flies well, however it feels incredibly stable in my hands, and it is steady and flies smoothly in reasonable wind. You can try judge from the video whether it flies well, but the thing that I notice the most is it is quite heavy in the air. I haven't weighed it, but it is certainly over a kilo, but the thing doesn't mind, it climbs quite quickly and easily, and it seems very powerful despite it's size and weight. The main result of the weight is that it is very steady, and picks up speed rather fast. I haven't really pushed it, but it seems to be quite fast for something of it's size. 

The electronics I used are:

- KK2.1.5 Flight controller

- Turnigy Park300 1380Kv Outrunners

- Afro 20A ESCs (SimonK)

- 8045 SF Props

- Turnigy 2200mAh 3S 20C Lipo

- OrangeRx R620 6ch DSM2

- Spektrum DX4e

Thanks to HobbyKing for all the parts and to Flite Test for all the guidance and inspiration it took into making this happen.

Some images of the quad:

The KK2 is armed and the motors are spooling up. The landing gear are the tails of plastic suction darts from a toy crossbow with the heads cut off. They have holes in them, which makes them very easy to ziptie to the boom. They are incredibly strong and don't snap; in a hard landing they either bend or the zipties holding them break. 

I mounted the battery underneath the frame on a tray, similair to the FT Camera tray. This is made of two pieces of plywood sandwiching a layer of soft foam. The tray has room for a GoPro. In a hard crash not long after this image was taken, the tray was destroyed and I have thus scrapped it. I may build a new one, as the old one was rather poor quality. For my next quad, I am planning to use heavy-guage zipties to mount the camera tray.

The quad in flight. I think it looks just awesome! 

Here is an early picture of the quad- you can see the wooden motor mounts in this image. The 250mm booms are arranged in a conventional 'X' configuration, and the quad measures 550mm motor to motor. 

I drew out the hub on 2mm plywood and cut it out with a chisel and a hacksaw. The two center hub plates are very flimsy, however when the booms are tight in place the frame is very rigid. 

Here is the quad in flight. It has sustained many hard landings and impacts, and the landing gear have held up incredibly well. In one crash, (sadly not on video) the quad smashed straight into a wall at high speed, and was badly damaged. Due to the simplicty and frugality of the design, I simply replaced two booms, re-ziptied landing gear and motors, and the quad was up and running again in half an hour.

Although the quad is rather poorly made and is not much of a looker, the learnings from this project will help me with making much stronger, cleaner and better quads in the future.