Fortis TITAN - BUILD

After dealing with a Flame Wheel 450 and having arms break and stability problems, I decided to look for a rugged and durable flight platform that would fit my style and last through some bumps.

On the right, in the ad column, I saw an ad for a Fortis Tricopter. I built a tricopter out of aluminum, and it flies better than what my quad did, so I gave it a look. 

Fortis is a simple company with frames and accessories made of good thickness delrin, with a lot of engineering behind everything. I loved the idea of the break away arms, and all the zip tied mounts. While I did some research on other frames, I decided on the TITAN. 

After getting my order together and talking with the owner, Zach, about some fpv camera items, I had my parts within 2 days. wow!

This article will go over some of the Pros and Cons of the kit, and show some of my modifications.

 The Kit starts at $79.99 - found here.

I got the kit with 16 inch Carbon booms, and a delrin top. I was going for a blackout kind of build since I am good at sleeving. After I got the booms, I immediately went out and got some 5/16 wooden dowel and made his hybrid booms found here on Flitetest and here. Anything can help, right?

Below are the landing gear.

Left: How the pieces come out of the bag. This is a pretty good representation of all the pieces. They still have some "slag" in the smaller bits, and they need to be popped out.

Middle: After getting all the bits out, the masking comes off really easy. 

Right: The friction fit pieces go well together. They still requires small zipties to be totally secure, but I had to compress it into the slot.

The TITAN comes with a nice, electonics cover that protects your radio, FC, and anything else you would like to put under there. The standoffs are the perfect height to allow the servo cables to be mounted up and still ahve good clearance. 

As part of my "Blackout" build, I used some of my old high quality sleeving from Lutro0 Customs and sleeved the individual wires, to get a cleaner look. 

Here is how it folds up, fully load I might add. I have added:

• MultiWii Pro 2.0 
• Turnigy SK3 2628 920KV 
• Gemfan 10 x 4.5 Props
• Multistar 20A ESC
• Fatshark 250mw 5.8ghz vTX
• Fatshark 600TVL
• Multiwii GPS
• GoPro 3 Silver Plus

This is the Silver 3+ on the camera mount. It is like David's Mount, but has a little more vibration reduction to it. The piece that holds the GoPro in the downwards angle is removeable. The slots on the bottom have been cut a little larger so the part can be removed by hand. Nice touch!

And here it is all folded out. The O rings that hold the arms in place are VERY sturdy. It takes a good jolt for them to release, but then are reset with ease. The silicon on the ends of the booms are a great touch. They allow the motor mount to grip the carbon boom, which is really slick, and actually dampen vibrations even more.

I allow slack of the wires so that in the event of a crash, the booms can move freely. 

Using a Hi-Tech HS-82MG, the servo is 100x better than my home-made tri yaw system on my last tricopter. Every solid and well designed, it has tons of travel and I was lucky to get mine centered well. It doesn't make a single noise when armed. 

FPV camera: Something that I was gracious to get, was a prototype FPV board camera mount. I Had to modify it a bit to fit the 600TVL, but those modifications were small. While running without the GoPro camera mount, the arms on the sides of the board camera mount, protect the lens from some impacts. 

Hopefully, once it warms up, I get this up to a true maiden flight.

TLDL: This frame is perfect for me. I am going to crash a lot, and this will take the falls. It has the accesories and expandability of any other tri out there.