Radio Control Dambusters

in the early 1940s British engineer by the name Barnes Wallis was experimenting with skipping marbles across a water tank in his garden this eventually led to one of the most famous engineering marvels of world war ii where a barrel shaped explosive was skipped across the surface of a lake to destroy enemy dams commonly known as the dam Busters now instead of this video being a historical documentary why don't we try to replicate this on a slightly smaller scale this video sponsored by Kiwi Co more on that later a 3d printed this prototype barrel with the plan that the slot will contain a CNC cut aluminium disc this would allow the weight of the bow to be adjusted as well as its rotational inertia when bonds Wallis tested the barrels he discovered that adding backspin was essential to getting him to skip the spinning created gyroscopic stability and kept the barrels pointing in the correct orientation but I soon decided I didn't really want to see and see cut a bunch of aluminium discs that would most likely end up at the bottom of a lake so I decided to print this barrel with threaded countersunk holes this way I can use large bolts to increase the mass of the barrel which saves a lot of time and cost speaking of time this took 11 and a half hours to 3d print and I'm going to need a few of them so the final design will be cut from this PVC pipe and a quick tip to make a quick and easy straight cut through a tube wrap packing tape around until the ends meet without creasing the tape then work your way around using a hacksaw and the cuts should be pretty straight then I can use these 3d printed end caps to mount the bolts too as well as a center axle to spin the barrel you'll probably notice from this test footage the barrel looks more like a sphere than the cylinder so I've 3d printed these curved sections that clamp around the cylindrical barrel however the actual spherical barrel is proved difficult to manufacture at the time and therefore these straight cylindrical barrels were eventually used in the raid but I'd still like to test both now we need to make the release mechanism the actual release mechanism Barnes Wallis designed sandwiched a barrel between two arms which would pivot outwards slightly and drop the barrel but before release it was spun up using an electric motor via a belt and pulley system shadow types are Brian from the YouTube channel real engineering for letting me use his animation so a 3d printed a replica mount to hold the barrel but instead of using a belt and pulley system to spin the barrel I use a small brush this motor directly on the barrel axle for simplicity so one arm contains a brushless motor and that other contains a bearing each with a cone that meets well with the barrel but in order to keep the barrel in position the arms needs to be held in words and this is done using a string system and a short piece of elastic attached to a servo this causes the arms to be sprung loaded and creates a tight clamping force against the sides of the barrel then when it is ready to release the servo simply lets go of the elastic so the release mechanism works well but there's a slight problem the barrel sink now because I don't want to be littering these barrels all over the bottom of a lake and I also don't want to have to make loads of them for testing I need them to float I then realized a really simple fix is to get a ziploc bag and fill it with air then once sealed I can put it inside of the barrel and the barrel will float no matter how much water leaks in so now we need something to drop it from so I've teamed up to wave at James from Project air the YouTube channel where he builds things like this this is a large scale Lancaster bomber and you built this out of foam board right yep it's all homemade bit of a buzz job recycle some electronics in there now we're going to throw it over a lake and see if Tom sir bouncing barrel works let's just do a controls check quickly that's left that's right that's up that's down that goes that way that goes out yeah all right chaps yep as ready as we'll ever be right oh god it's got a lot of up oh wow that looks amazing I think the battery cables come out it's flying though look at that how she looks really good yeah so this is a lot of foam and a lot of look how slow it's going as well it's got there's a lot of motors in the air at one time no idea what the stall speed is oh yes nice one yeah oh my god the circle nice format we decided it would be best to test the curve balls first as they might be a bit more forgiving in terms of skipping across the water so with all the cameras rolling and the surprisingly large crowd watching we were somewhat ready I'm ready okay unsurprisingly James's awesome homemade lancaster handled the weight of the barrel and its release mechanism with each good yep okay ready Tom okay down coming down then we just pause right here Barnes Wallis calculated that in order to skip the barrel successfully across the water the planes we need to fly at 100 meters per second ground speed and drop the barrels from an altitude of 18 meters this would result in the boughs hitting the water at about a 10 degree angle some quick calculations estimate that this plane is traveling at 13.4 meters per second at an altitude of 4.5 meters which should result in the barrel hitting the water at 45 degrees now this may seem like a rookie mistake but Barnes Wallis actually made the same mistake when initially testing his barrels it was in time to land the plane which wasn't exactly easy seeing as there was a wall and a lake on one side and a very steep drop on the other so it's a little damaged isn't it James yes but don't worry so we fixed the plane and got it back in the air this time around my mechanism failed to spin the barrel up fast enough and I told James to fly back around but before he was able to do another pass the barrel came loose from the mechanism completely my fault and very frustrating as the landings weren't easy so every flight counted fortunately James landed it beautifully and it was all good friend of the flight yep this time with the straight cylindrical barrel just like what was used in the actual rate I'm getting nervous again scary all this work in the air I want the video to be good so I hope you're enjoying this yep good okay James flew the plane round with a long run-up to allow the barrel to spin up slowly lower the altitude was also gaining speed and I did that was great yes let's take a look at that again from the high speed the plane was traveling at an estimated fifteen point six meters per second and dropped the barrel from an altitude of about one point three four meters which was really impressive flying from James causing the barrel to impact the water at an angle of 19 degrees which is quite a bit steeper than Barnes Wallis originally aimed for but to still managed an initial skip distance of five point five meters with a total of three skips spanning eight point four five meters however it wasn't over there the mission still had to be completed which was made significantly harder by this rogue propeller this planes done its mission and then it just it didn't make it home boys like I was so nervous it was very low actually three times I think yeah quite a few times it was then time to collect the barrels with James's homemade hydrofoil boat whilst I made some modifications so the barrel dropped mechanism its amount of the underside of a large drone I just built the week before for future heavy lift projects how would you feel about flying it Tom whilst I'll show some of the drone tests I'd like to mention the sponsor for this video Kiwi Co Kiwi Co delivers monthly projects designed to make learning about science arts math and more fun and accessible they have seven different crates for kids aged zero to sixteen plus and they sent me one of their tinkerer craze which is aimed at ages nine and above now if you follow my project here on YouTube you'll know why I couldn't have been happier to receive this each crate contains detailed instructions and an educational magazine along with the project supplies I enjoyed assembling this kit and appreciated that it can be assembled without the use of glue or other outside tools once assembled I added a few batteries and bolts as a counterweight though this could be anything even rocks from the garden I then loaded it and it launched a supplied ping-pong ball first try I was also pleased to read the educational magazine which covered the history of trebuchet DS the basic physics behind levers and even how changing variables such as arm length and counterweight mass will affect the projectiles range Kirikou a subscription-based service which deliver their crates monthly so there are many of other different projects to build so if you want to find out more about QE code go to kiwi cocom forward slash tom stanton and receive your first monthly subscription crate for free so thanks the Kiwi Co for sponsoring this project now back to the barrel skipping yes so I was able to get a few good skips using the drone but it suffered in terms of forward speed especially when accelerating in such a short distance it may have helped if I had flown lower but I didn't really want to risk crashing it I still can't believe how lucky we were to have that one successful test if that propeller had fallen off literally a minute earlier we wouldn't have had that a successful test and the whole project would have just flopped I travelled quite far north to visit James and he put a load of effort into building the plane so there was a lot riding on that final flight we didn't know it was going to be the final flight but that's how it ended also the weather that day was just perfect low winds clear skies the day before and the day after were really windy and really wet so I think we were just lucky all round I want to say a massive thanks to James for building Lancaster model he did a great job in terms of making it look scale and also in it like it flew really well and unfortunately I wasn't able to fly it due to the unchanged or disassembly but James did a great job of piloting it also thanks to James for coming up with the idea to do this project because if it wasn't for James he wouldn't be watching this video right now I'll be posting a link to James's channel in the description down below so go check out some of his videos he's put together a two-part miniseries of him building the plane and also his side of the testing so if you're interested in find out more then go and subscribe to James in the description down below I also want to say thanks to Matt from the YouTube channel DIY perks for coming along he helped film a lot of the shots James and I had our hands full all day with James obviously flying the plane and I was launching the plane and controlling the release mechanism so the rest of the cameras were just on tripods and Matt was able to film the tracking shots across the surface of the lake so thanks to Matt for helping with that thanks once again for watching if you enjoyed this video be great if you could leave a thumbs up down below if we're new to my channel and want to see more projects similar to this then click subscribe down below a massive thank you to all of my supporters over on patreon comm you make these projects possible and I honestly couldn't do these projects without your support so thanks once again thanks for us again for watching and I'll see you in the next video goodbye [Music] I did those graves it actually did [Music]

Channel: Tom Stanton

Views: 1,098,121

Rating: 4.9285073 out of 5

Keywords: dambusters, RC plane, plane, aircraft, radio control, Barnes Wallis, barrel, skip, water skip, engineering, engineer, project, inertia, fly, flying, drop, drone, lake, water, testing, homemade, DIY, crash, splash, dam, dambuster, dambusted, dambuster theme, dambuster song

Id: uFvgBS17QfM

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019