Toroidal Propeller Tutorial in Fusion 360 for FPV Drones

well long time no tutorial hopefully this recording will go a bit smoother than the first few welcome back to striking fpv r d my name is Ashton and in a perfect world I would have already printed my tutorial props and be flying them around the garden but alas here I am waiting for hardened steel nozzles to arrive so I can put an old roll of carbon petg that I have laying around to good use but for now you will finally get a step by step on how to produce my toroidal propellers so that you can make your own at before I begin I didn't get a chance to mention it in my last video because he uploaded after me but a gentleman by the name of Marvel Matt or maybe just Matt muffle he printed my version 3 triloop toroidal designs in a 5 inch size using nylon carbon fiber very cool material you buffed it out with a Dremel made it really really smooth and it resulted in tri-loop blades that were actually lighter weights than injection molded tri-blades that he had laying around and it performed comparably as well so similar flight times similar flight characteristics of a bit weird on punch outs apparently but it worked well and it was also perceivably quieter with the more whooshy noises I was quite excited by this result because not only was it my design and it actually performed well but especially because it was an fdm print with a good but you know not perfect fish it's still a given that SLA is going to be the way to do this but Matt's achievement kind of proves that fdm still has still has legs to go on you know it's actually performing better than even I thought it would be so it's making me quite hopeful for my eventual prints so much like my past modeling tutorials we're going to be using Fusion 360 which is free for non-commercial use but a lot of the steps here I believe can be replicated in most of the other cat programs like SolidWorks free cat things like that I will preface this though there were a lot of decisions regarding my design that I mentioned in my last video you can check that up there that are based off me making the print fdm friendly with minimal supports and or post processing and the biggest disclaimer is that I am not a professional engineer in any way shape or form and there are some shortcuts to the way that I've done things which are not ideal for like real airfoil design but for our purposes I believe it to be close enough with that let's get started so welcome back to fusion 360. and this is the not so gem fan model that I used in my last video to demonstrate the idea behind varying angle of attack across the length of the blade and the way I made this model was basically a bunch of offset planes a bunch of offset blade profiles and these blade profiles were basically mimicking the angle as demonstrated by these helixes or helices whatever you want to call them now the way these helixes or helices work is you basically generate a coil using the coil tool up here set the ground plane set the diameter to the diameter of the prop and then crucially the revolutions must be set to 1 and the height must be set to the pitch of the prop that you want to make so in this case 25.4 millimeters is one inch multiplied by three means that this is a three inch pitch Helix so if we click OK we can then examine the other ones and the midpoint you know it's a smaller diameter but the same height as well as the Hub same smaller diameter again but the same height and from that you can determine roughly the angle that you need to work with after that you draw out the shape which I'll demonstrate later and then all you have to do is Loft them together using the Loft command basically you have profile one two and three it will automatically sweep across and generate the profile then you run a circular pattern tool which you can set to any number of blades actually so I could set it to six eight we could make a 10 blade fan like this by click OK there you go starting to look like a turbine actually more than more than a propeller and then you add the Hub and everything's good so that's the basic premise behind what designing a prop is like the most crucial part being the varying angle of attack across the blades now we can actually get into designing the toroidal prop so we start out first with a new document and just for fun let's create our hub first so that we kind of have a reference of what's going on our Hub is typically 12 millimeters in diameter with a five millimeter hole for the shaft so we can just type in 5.2 I like to add 0.2 for a little bit extra clearance and then after that you finish the sketch and then all you have to do is hit extrude and set it to six millimeters because that is also the standard height of our preferred props now once you have that I'm going to start recommending that we actually name the sketches because normally sketch one two three four five is not very descriptive and will be much easier if we actually name them so you just click the text type in what you want so this is Hub five millimeter same with the body you can right click and rename as well Hub five millimeter and that is going to be our starting point now we need to create the first element which is the blade profile normally we could just create it on this axis but I'm not going to do that I'm going to instructor plane select the same axis sorry the plane axis and then we're going to drag it up by about three millimeters this just means that we will clear the actual shaft area click OK and then we select the plane and start our sketch now crucially we need to make sure 3D sketch is turned off as well as show projected geometries because we don't need to do the projected geometries thing just yet and what we're going to do is we're going to draw our first shape so demonstrate how kind of chill we can do let's just set off with a chord line of sorts so this is at a 56 degree angle that's fair enough I'm going to click OK it's now giving you warnings about the projected geometries but like I said we're not dealing with them so we're not going to worry about that in fact once we've got the line in place we can actually turn off the Hub by clicking on the little I next to it to hide it and now we can work with this chord line what is a chord line the chord line is basically the furthest forward part of the blade the Leading Edge of the blade all the way to the train the edge of the blade that's not exactly how we're going to be using this but it's pretty close enough for this point now we need to create the shape of the blade and we're going to do that using the fit Point spline tool up over here click on the trailing Edge click on the Leading Edge and then instead of clicking on the back again just click anywhere down there now this tool is going to keep trying to draw for you you just have to double click to stop it and then press escape to exit the tool now we're going to zoom in to the top and you see these green handles these handles are basically going to help control the shape of our spline so we can drag them back and forth and that will basically Define how wide of a curve that that's going to generate in this case you'll notice I can't drag it up and down anymore because the sketch is automatically added a constraint a horizontal or vertical one that will show up as this little icon we can get rid of that if you click on it and press delete and then we can drag it freely around again but actually we are going to re-add that constraint a little bit later on or you know what control Z controls that and that constraint is back and now we can only move it left to right which is fine as we will see later down here if we click on the line again we get to see more handles for the spline so what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this one out just a little bit we'll probably click again drag it over there this I'm going to pull back and we're also going to drag this handle a little bit to this point so that we have a bit of a cup shape to the blade like in my actual V3 and V2 designs at this point we've kind of got the shape that we like so we can delete the chord line there's no need for that anymore and then we're going to draw one last line along the base and the reason why we're adding that and not making it perfectly pointy at the end is because like I said before we're trying to 3D print and 3D prints work really well if you have a nice base that goes onto the build platform so that is what this is going to be at this point we could just click finish sketch but I wanted everything to be done parametrically or at least more easy to edit and fine tune for testing purposes right so what we're going to do is we're going to start adding demand functions so we're going to click up here the sketch Dimension tool I'm going to add little things so start in the middle click on the trailing Edge click on the bottom and we'll just leave that at two millimeters we're going to do the same for the top two millimeters and then I'm also going to do the same for the top again but this time if you drag to the right you then get to set the dimension vertically here it's saying that it's over constrained because once again there is actually if we click on this point a constraint in place so I need to delete that first now I can re-add the sketch dimension and there we go six millimeters I could then change this to five if I wanted to oh no I can't because there's another constraint still left on these guys of course so I've got to delete that constraint now one last try come on baby five mil now I can change the height relatively easily so we'll deal with that a little bit later the other thing I like to add a sketch Dimension to is the base that we're working with so that's 0.5 if you have a 0.4 millimeter nozzle on your print it's usually a good idea to have two well one parameter line so it's two lines per blade so I'm going to set this to 0.4 mil just to make sure that the bed adhesion is pretty decent but if you were designing this for say an SLA print then you could reduce that to like 0.2 0.3 whatever you feel like but this is just another way to control that the other thing I'm going to add control things too is over here I'm going to drag this up let's set that to 0.35 just make it a bit wider so it's nice and thick profile starts and then the last ones are going to be these handles which would be quite fun so let's do 1.35 make it a bit taller same for this one 1.35 and then the horizontal 0.6 is fine same for this zero point oh 0.4 then and there we have it we have our first profile so let's finish the sketch we're going to name this we're going to call it profile start so now we have our very first profile and the Hub is there just for scale start it off again the next step is to create the profile on the opposite side so double click the profile we just created select the whole thing Ctrl C to copy or you can right click and where is it copy finish the sketch and now we're going to go to the side view construct select the same plane but instead of going forward this way we're going to go back the other way by minus three mils sway across to this side click on the plane start a sketch and paste and what you get is an exact replica of the other one I'm going to click OK and then just for ease of use we're going to hide the opposite one now what we need to do is flip it over so how do we do that well first of all let's delete these weird lines these lines are generated from the projected geometries because of the Hub so I'm going to delete those no need for them if I draw a line it needs to be a vertical line it can be literally anywhere on top sometimes but this is a better idea select the lines that we want to flip and then we're going to use the mirror tool if it's not there you can click on Create and find mirror uh these three dots appear so that you can pin it to the toolbar that's something that might be useful for you guys in the future and something one of my commenters on the very first Fusion 360 tutorial I did suggested to me if I wanted to make things easier so thanks to that dude anyway we're going to click on the mirror tool and it's already selected these objects now we just have to select the mirror line which is the one that we just drew click gives us a little preview on that side click ok and there you have it we have a mirrored shape but of course this one is still there that's also totally fine just need to delete this and the mirror line because we don't need them make sure everything is gone and in this we can just quite simply use the move tool to drag it back into place now obviously this is now lacking in sketch Dimensions so we can start adding those back by clicking that's such this should be a relatively quick operation I might fast forward this and there we have it that didn't take too much time at all especially when you could fast forward things and then we finish the sketch and we can unhide the other one and yeah you can see with the Hub as well these are our start and then profiles for the blade let's just quickly rename the SketchUp profile and hide the Hub again because now we're going to create one more sketch that's roughly on the same plane so click on create sketch click there let's zoom in relatively close to these things just draw a line on the ground we'll make it one mil for now draw a spline that goes up by two down again remember you need to double click to end the operation press escape to exit the tool and for this I'm just gonna drag these control lines vertical this one I'm going to drag out just to make it a bit chubbier very bullet shaped and now we get to add Dimensions once more so first of all let's get this Dimension set the base doesn't need to be one millimeter thick at the edge so we're just going to set it to 0.8 we could make it less we could make it more same thing we want this to remain Center so we're going to set this to 0.4 which is half of 0.8 and then we also want to control how much of the outer bow we have so let's just 0.1 ate this maybe all good and the final thing is to set it away from the center of our Hub so we click the outer edge click down here and then now what is it it's 25.4 is one inch multiplied by three inches is our diameter divided by 2 is our radius click ok and it moves the whole thing over here so that is done finish the sketch and rename this to profile Edge now we're starting to get somewhere now if we were to use the Loft tool and try to Loft these together click one and two you get some really odd behaviors so yeah it's trying to do something it's not doing a great job cancel that because now we need to add one more crucial part and that is going to be the mid profiles so to do that we're going to construct a plane but instead of clicking on the right we're going to click on the front back plane and we're going to drag it roughly halfway between the start hubs and the edge and how's this work it's got to be 25.4 multiplied by 3 divided by 2 to get the radius and divided by 2 again to get the halfway point click ok select it start a sketch and now we start drawing so if I recall correctly what we can do let's just start at five mil instead of instead of at six so we'll click there drag it out and it's going to be about a 20 6 24 I think it was 26. yeah we'll do 26 as our preferred angle in this case once again we're going to draw a line forward that can be 0.8 and now we're going to draw our slime trailing Edge Leading Edge and then back to the end of the base double click and now you can see it's much much narrower than the other ones that we used to do so we gotta zoom in here and drag this out okay that's looking not too bad maybe we need to add a bit of a bow so let's just drag this up nice okay we'll drag this one up as well and I think that's not too bad of a shape I'm just gonna make this a little bit wider okay not too bad let's press enter and be happy with that there's no need to press enter apparently delete the chord line and now we need to Dimension this so Dimensions we've already got our 0.8 there which is fine we then also need to Dimension from the Leading Edge to the rear edge you'll Now set to 10 that's no problem need to set the height of that as well to be safe that's five then we can add Dimensions to our handles and we'll just leave them as they are but we can of course modify them later to our liking last one and now of course we need to set the distance away from the Hub so all we have to do is select the outer edge select the center and now we do our weird calculations 25.4 multiplied by 3 divided by 2 divided by 2 again all good now we need one on the opposite side as well so let's press Escape select that and we should be able to right click copy and if I control B to paste has it done it I don't know no it hasn't done it yet control is being weird let me try that again Ctrl C Ctrl v ah there we go now we just have to drag this across roughly where we need it doesn't have to be perfect and uh what else now we need to set the dimension from the outer point which is this all the way back to the center same calculation goes 25.4 times 3 divided by two divided by two and there we have it the only thing left to really set is basically these control points so this is a bit of a weirder one I will set the distance between these two like so and then the distance between these two like so as well so that can be 0.08 so 0.01 let's make it a bit taller and this could be 0.4 excellent and we'll do the same with this one there to there 0.1 add the same gear 0.4 so now once again we're in a position where we can better control the whole thing except now this is lifted off the ground strangely so I need to drag that down and we're going to lock the horizontal vertical there I think the same thing happened here this moved yes it did slide while I added those Dimensions so let's just drag it back down to where it needs to be you know what if we're not satisfied with just dragging it around what we can also do is to mention this the top one with the center of our world if we do that we can set that to five exactly and that will shift the whole thing down as well so let's just drag it over here and that should be it finish the sketch and now let's look at our fine work so at this point we're actually able to try creating the Loft so let's click our Loft tool over here we're going to add our first profile which is the stock profile where is it here we go the next profile the next profile the next profile and the next one if we click OK you can now see that our operation is turned into a kind of funny diamond shape it's not very circular the reason for that is because we haven't added any rails yet so we got to undo this and start working on our rails and before we do that I forgot to name the sketch let's set that to profile mid the mid profile so the first one is very easy all we have to do is create on the ground play and this is where things become a little bit weird because we could just freestyle this make sure show projected geometries is on we could just click on the Outer Edge Outer Edge Outer Edge outer edge of the bottom plane and outer edge and that finish and this ends up producing a profile similar to what the lofting tool did but the issue with running this operation is that if we try to shape this into the ideal shape it doesn't quite work it has some slightly odd behaviors that are a little bit difficult to work with so you know just to demonstrate I'll try to clean it up but ultimately it's not it's not really producing the shape that we want so let's undo this and now what we're going to do is we're going to create a circle and the circle two Point Circle from the outer edge down to the center the important thing about this circle is that we're not using it as a rail we're just going to use it as a guide so you click on it and press X and that turns it into a dotted line which allows us to basically not use it as a rail so all the solid body operations will not reference it anymore it's just there for us while we design so what we need to do now is create a spline once again we're going to start at our outer edge of the base over there so you can see so we click click and then click and I'm going to end it there for reasons that I'll explain a little bit later maybe double click escape to exit the tool now what we want to do is set our handles to be horizontal so easiest way to do this I mean this one has already locked itself to the circle but the circle is moving around so we're not we don't need it to do that what we can do though is we can add constraints using this so horizontal vertical let's just select the entire line that is the handle smash that and that because completely horizontal same thing will go for this and the same thing can be done for this handle line and now they are all horizontal or vertical which is crucial for what we're about to do now the thing is this we kind of want this line to follow the circle as much as it can so this top one is already you know pretty close we can drag it in a little bit to get it a little closer the same for this if we drag this up or down I'm getting it more along the line which is kind of what we want and then this one is kind of the spanner in the works because it's it's off the line completely but this is fine because it's not leading anywhere it is coming out of the Hub so all we need to do is just make it look nice and rounded and that will probably do us fine now we got to continue the whole thing but the next one is a little bit weirder because it's not following the outer line it needs to join here so the way we can do that is we go to create and we make an ellipse you gotta click the center click the azure and then click the point to make our sort of egg shape but we're going to click on basically here once again select the line press X to convert it to a construction line and now we have our second Guide to the whole thing in fact while we're here we can trim this bit because we don't need it and we can trim the other bit because we don't need it and we have our line shape our guide shape now we click on the spline tool zoom in on that upper Edge click on this point there and then click on the final one at the bottom double click to end the operation escape to exit the tool and once again what we're going to use our horizontal vertical thing too make these lines completely vertical or horizontal either or the reason why you want them to match in this case these two sets of handles for this line as well as for the exiting line if they are both completely horizontal together then it means when the lines meet there's no noticeable noticeable angle difference or change or jaggedness so if they're mismatched then the line Curve will be like this and then the next one will come in like that and it becomes a point but if they're both if the control lines are with each other then the Curve will be much smoother so by setting it there we can then drag this oh crawl one let's drag the correct one the small one it's a roughly follow that line down there can be a little bit narrower for reasons that are obvious later on when you think about toroidal shapes having it a little bit pointier is going to be a little bit better for the angle of attack the rest of this is roughly okay and then this one could just come in like that and there you have it we have our first set of rails now we just need to do the same thing for the inner side so same deal let's create a spline clickity Clickety and click it in double click Escape we're going to set this to be horizontal set that to be horizontal and set this to be horizontal and here's the trick to get roughly similar results is you want these lies to be about the same you can lock them to each other I'm not going to do that for reasons that might become obvious we're gonna make this roughly the same and then we're going to make that roughly the same and here's the thing right even though they're matched what ends up happening is the widths of our base still becomes narrower between the control points in the middle section between the actual points so my solution to this is have to start and end be roughly the same but then we'll just make the middle section A little bit smaller and as you can see that kind of brings things back to back to ballots so I'm just going to maybe clock that there and I'm relatively happy with that for now we'll continue our adventure by creating the rest of the spline for the rest of the Volta rail that goes there double click once more end it gonna drag this spline almost level and then use the tool to make it horizontal why is that not working let's double check what I'm clicking on color all right click that there we go click this one to make it vertical and click that one to make it horizontal all good and once again we're just going to roughly match these with one another except in a roughly match these with one another except for the mid one which needs to be a bit smaller to help maintain the blade the base thickness and with that I'm pretty satisfied so I'm going to finish the sketch don't forget to name it we're going to call this rail and call it base so it's the base rail now this is already looking kind of interesting so let's for fun do the Loft command so click on Loft we're going to select our first profile our second profile and then now just to show you how it's going to work we'll click on the plus sign for rails and select our bottom rails one and two as you can see it's making the shape conform to the bottom rail but it's still not guiding the top very good in fact if I go completely vertical this shape I don't like it doesn't make any sense so we're gonna have to fix that but anyway let's add more profiles to see how it continues oh there's an error there and this error actually happens quite frequently uh so if I cancel that additional profile there and click ok what happens when you finish an operation it always hides the sketches that you just used if they're the first time being used so I'm going to unhide them using the tools here we're going to Loft again and we're going to try and continue the shape from there to here no problem and we'll add the rails on the bottom and as you can see it was actually fine creating that shape so for some reason if you try to complete the whole thing with rails it's not happy but if you do one half first or even one quarter sometimes it will be happier so now I can add the final profile and click OK and there you go we now have a very very strange looking toroidal crop Loop but like I said this is not done because we need to add one more set of rails so what we're going to do undo to this point we're going to add another sketch and this is going to need the construct select the ground plane and lift it up to roughly the height of that which is actually six millimeters click OK select the elevated plane you can see it's at the same level as the top of our start profiles and we're going to click sketch and once again before we actually begin drawing out the whole thing we should draw our guide circles so let's start with circle two Point Circle to click on the center and this time instead of clicking on the other end we're going to click on the midpoint of the edge profile select that circle press X to turn it into a guideline go to ellipse select the center of our Circle is at the center of our Circle yes it is select one of the outer edges and then we're going to click on this rail Point here once again select that press X to turn it into a guideline a construction line and then we're going to trim off the ones that we don't need so we don't need that one and we don't need that one because we're trying to follow this top Outer Edge so once we have that now we can actually create our funny spline so let's click on the first one the second point and then click on the midpoint double click to end it press escape to exit the tool let's drag our control roughly horizontal and then just select the line press the constraint click on this one to constrain it as well as well as this one went the wrong way so undo drag it closer to horizontal and then use the tool where is it and select the line there we go and now we have our control points press escape to stop using the tool and once again we're going to drag this into kind of roughly follow the shape here there we go that's nice that went really quickly I'm very satisfied with that all right in the final bit we'll create the spline click on the top one there click on the auto one here and then click on the final one there double click this should work fine if I use the tool there horizontal vertical horizontal press escape to exit the tool and now we just need to try and match the curvature of that outer thing so that is about right oh it went in why did it go in oh no it accidentally snapped to one of the projected geometries and it's added the constraint there so I can either delete the constraint or I can undo I'll just undo it that makes sense so let's just drag it in place hopefully it's not going to snap again there we go hold that in as well oh it's giving me a menu click again to get out of it drag that here nice and then the last one we should drag this a little bit further in like so and you know what I think I'm pretty satisfied with that because it also semi mimics the bottom rail so everything seems to be seems to be about right so with that we can click finish sketch and it's all ready to go except you'll notice it's not because our mid profile is actually only five millimeters tall and our edge profile is only two millimeters tall and the sketch is floating above them at six millimeters above the ground plane so how do we deal with that well first of all let's rename our sketch to rail and uh what do we call it upper I guess we're going to go back in and remember before I said turn off 3D sketch well now we get to turn it on so with 3D sketch on we can rotate to the side and we can start to mess with these control points in 3D space so for these two we'll click one hold shift and then select the other if I click on the move and copy tool hopefully I should be able to drag this down and I can't the reason why I can't is because there is once again a constraint in place so you need to go back to the vertical and have a look and indeed There's a constraint here that we need to delete so select it delete it all good let's try this again select our two points that we want to shift down select the move tool and drag down there we go so now we can drag it up and down in 3D space like so I'll look at fun so we'll just drag it down to that point click ok and now we need to drag this down and of course there's a bunch of constraints that have been applied to it so select and press delete make sure that our none floating around on the handles because if the handles have constraints on them that are going to limit it that will also cause issues they don't so let's click on our Point click on our move tool and once again drag it down to where we need it to be and as you can see one of them decided not to go so with that I can select that and then also drag it down it's not dragging down therefore it means There's a constraint on it so let's have a look click it and yep constraints have reappeared so remove those now we should be able to drag it down I am dragging one of the ellipses down so that's not what I wanted is it let's click on the line itself and then click on the points click on the handles make sure we've got it let's just try this one more time it's still dragging that line so let's leave that a lot oh you're being very very irritating this is what we're trying to do isn't it yes what if I delete this on that track oh it's still trying to track the ellipse let's just delete those because we don't really need them anymore now we have only that left there we go how irritating well if somebody knows how to better deal with that let me know in the comments that's just one of the things that happens when you're flying by the seat of your pets in Fusion 360. anyway click ok now the rails are roughly where they need to be this one is too low for some reason so let's lift that back up and how bizarre how bizarre that was different does that mean that this particular rail is at the wrong height let's check profile mid nope it's exactly where it should be there we go it's always good to check that your sketches line up because if the rails don't line up the Loft tool will not work anyway I think we are now at a point where I can actually do the full Lop so let's click on our Loft tool select the first profile the second profile and at this point we can add the bottom rails and now the Moment of Truth the top rail drum roll please hey okay it didn't throw an error believe me I've been doing this for a while and I'm so scared to click on all the rails because it very often throws an error because of a tiny misalignment or even weird errors like oh it's tangent to the profile which I don't understand why that's an issue but anyway with that click add We'll add another profile and knowing my luck this is gonna throw an error if I select this one yes it has so just click the X remove that we'll click OK for now once again the sketches have disappeared so we need to unhide them again and then we'll continue with our Loft command click there click there add the rails game one two three and then we'll add our final profile there click ok and now we can actually hide hide the shapes because this ladies and gentlemen is roughly what we were aiming for now if you notice that maybe this could have a slightly more rounded shape on that side so the way we can fix that is it is the upper rail so all I have to do is pull this out a little bit more and maybe lengthen that just a bit now this isn't moving because it's now in 3D space so what happens when handles and points are in 3D spaces then you need to refer to this move tool because it's no longer 2D and then we can drag it a little bit to help develop the shape a little bit more we can do the same for this handle over here click ok finish sketch and if all is good yes it's automatically adjusted the command the lofting commands to produce the shape now the other thing you'll notice if we view this from the right is that there's a bit of a weird slopey thing going on and that is once again because of the handle so to fix that we need to go back into our upper rail double click that and this time we view from the side and you'll see that if we go completely right these handles are completely horizontal and that's why this shape is being made so what we need to do is select one of the handles click on the Move tool and that's not working once again because there is a constraint in place so we just need to delete set constraint same for the other side and once again select the handle no constraints this time you should be able to drag up and down yes we can so we go back to the right profile this time we drag it down like so and we can start to develop a nicer kind of shape for the whole thing let's try 0.5 what I would like to do in a perfect world is not have this lift up any higher than the top so 0.5 is good what about six six is not bad seven it started to go a little bit too high you can see these green lines here are showing that it's going above the original plane so you know what let's just be safe and set it to 0.5 maybe five five that'll do click ok and then we can do the same for the handles over here click on the Move tool drag it down that is clearly way too much let's just try 0.55 again or just 0.5 0.5 it is but you'll notice that it's not quite matching and matching is probably more important at this point so we can try 0.4 another 0.55 0.6 6 oh but it goes too high on that side so you know what it's not going to match let's just go 0.45 click OK finish the sketch and once again the thing did not blow up hooray so this I can safely say is our final blade Loop toroid thing now if you don't periodically say if your work you are full so let's just do that control s I'll call this the tutorial toroidal design it's in my toroidal propellers folder so we'll click save that's now going to save it to the cloud and our work is basically backed up for Rey it's now added over here on the left side it you can see it's not perfect if I really wanted to make this a bit more round it looks like an O shape I can once again you know double click on the rail base and make some small adjustments so I can drag this control point maybe I want to drag that down a bit more same for this one slightly this one can move out maybe a touch let's just go in like there same for this and you know what if I finish the sketch that's made it a little bit a little bit better but this is kind of the point where you can start to make your tweaks to your design As You Wish if I wanted this inner Edge to be a bit more aggressive so I could actually select these short ones and move them in and make them pointier like so finish and you'll see it's made this inner side of it points here so if I then go to the upper and do the same we just drag the short one in a little bit more I can't drag it in which means there's probably a constraint on it oh no because this is the upper rail so I need to select this so I'll drag that in by bit click OK finish sketch and you can see it's making it a little bit pointier there which is actually better for the blade profile in terms of trying to become a shallower angle of attack closer to the edge and in theory we should also be able to even lower the edge a little bit more so let's just try it out let's double click on profile Edge and did I even set the height of this I didn't so I've got to do that let's select our top one there oh that was set to 2.5 it was supposed to be set to two so let's set it to two pull it down a bit you know what 1.5 let's let's go For Broke see what happens finish the sketch now the loft it's not recalculated because one thing is wrong when we shifted that down if we reveal the upper rail the upper rail is still following the original design it's not actually at the new height so for that we need to go into the upper rail again view it from the side select it and drag it down to where it needs to be same for this one drag that down where it is to be click OK finish the sketch and there you have it we've now made our first kind of post generational operation to make the blade even thinner at the edge that's actually really cool looking and therefore even sharper in terms of the angle of attack at the edge so that is pretty decent but there you can see let's control s and save this there you can see how we can then modify the design sort of iterationally you know we don't have to create it from scratch every time we can go back into previous steps previous steps may break the process like when I moved one of the edges and the top rail no longer aligned but as long as you're aware of what needs to become aligned then things should be okay now the other thing is this there might be a way to get them to automatically align I don't know yet but if somebody wants to tell me in the comments you're more than welcome to now now the interesting thing happens where we get to actually start producing the shape so as oh that was always sticking up as a first step we've already created our first blade so we'll just call it loop loop one and this is where things are going to get messy so let's hide the Hub again we're going to select our Loop and we're going to click on the circular pattern tool select the vertical axis and that's made six we're not going to do six let's just make a try Loop because I like the try Loop so we type in three we click OK and now we have basically three of them but you'll notice that they're doing the thing where they're intersecting one another and the other thing you'll notice which I find quite interesting is that the Leading Edge over here is actually leaning over that bit and this is not good for the way that we want things to intersect so what I'm going to do to make sure that this part is on top of that is we're going to go back into the upper rail and we're going to adjust this curve here a little bit so whereas I moved it down by zero point I can't remember four let's move it back up by 0.2 click OK finish the sketch and as you can see it is now getting cut completely in half by the trailing blade and this is a good thing because now we get to perform the cutting operation so the way this works is we click on our original Loop here and we're going to click on combine even though we're not actually going to combine it this is a tool where things can be added to one another or subtracted from one another which is very cool so if we click on that we can now select the target body which is already here we need to select a tool body which is going to be this one and then we need to select the operation currently it's set to join but we can also set it to cut but what that will do is this second object will be used to slice through the first one all we have to do is Click ok second object disappears but now we have a very nice clean cut through our first one such that this is now our first object Loop two is just there along for the ride and then Loop one is now just this so this is where we start to get folders built up because I would like to just delete that but if I do that it deletes everything or gets rid of the whole option so don't do that let's undo what you need to do is without well what I did I created a new folder and I called it off Cuts because it's not necessary to use anymore so Loop I'm just going to put that in there and this one I also don't need so I'm just going to stick it in there and they are hidden so they're no longer needed if we're going to take our main Loop let's call it main Loop and once again circular pattern vertical axis three of them and there you have something a lot a lot more like what we're trying to build at this point we can once again use the combine command but instead of cutting we're going to join them or select the other two bodies like so click OK and now this has become one piece the reason why we wanted one piece is because we're going to do one more operation we're going to select this Edge this Edge and this Edge and we're going to attempt to smooth it by using the fillet command so you click fill it set the fillet size I guess to one and we click ok and now you can see what it's done it's made a nice smooth kind of transition which helps for strength especially at the base because now the bass has this really nice shape and at this point we're basically almost done now all you need to do is add the Hub back in and run the same operation again let's click combine select the blades click ok and behold we have our first three by three by three uh what do you call it counterclockwise the only thing left to do to just make this a little bit nicer is maybe try smoothing this Edge so if we click on these you'll see what happens or doesn't happen if I click fill it and type in one an error occurs and that's because this is way too close to the top it can't actually create the fillet so what we can do instead you select the top surface and we offset it by say two millimeters just to raise it up from this point now we can select those edges again and we can try the operation again so click fill it to type in one bow and and it didn't work again it genuinely hates me what about a smaller amount 0.4 ah 0.5 works it's happy with 0.5 what about six seven eight nine one so it doesn't lack one 0.99 you know what I think I know what this is caused by actually this is probably everything to do with the tightness of the Leading Edge here such that if I made the Leading Edge a little bit fatter I bet I could probably get it to work so let's test that theory by going back to our profile start and making this 0.5 okay and we'll do profile end why it's just renamed that one double click profile end 0.5 click OK all right now let's try these there you go I can now fill it them much nicer than before it's all to do with all the different radiuses radii that we've been setting for these different parts so with that we click ok and now we can pull this back down by minus two and you'll see it's managed to chop off the end and make this nice little circley bit there so we keep our fillets and we keep everything looking smooth the only thing left to do is add a little bit of chamfer to our shaft area by 0.5 and then of course if you wanted to be super super proper we can also mirror this right here so if we call this three by three by three kind of clockwise we can press mirror select the plane as that make sure it's set to make a new body instead of join click ok and then we can rename this now just cloth wise we have both of our toroidal try Loops now as a bonus feature if you wanted to actually make a bi-blade instead of a tri-blade then there is maybe one or two things that we could change slightly with this design so what we'll do I'll just undo everything that I did previously press delete on the history can hide our Hub once again where's our Hub there it is and what we can do instead of doing a circular operation which produces three we can change this operation to just make two and that will do this and then at this point you should be able to Simply combine literally everything together let's lift this up one more time combined oh no no no let's uh lift that up by a little bit by two select everything combine click ok and as you can see there's no offcuts anymore that has worked but you can see that a strange thing has happened because of the blade profiles and this is not really ideal for what we're trying to do so I'm going to demonstrate how to solve that basically I should be able to just go back to the stock profile and shift it Forward by like how we do this let's set the zero no not zero we can't do zero that's not possible set that to one set this to three actually let's set this to zero oh it doesn't let you do that let's set it to 0.1 and set this to four or three point nine technically save and that is improved things but now we need to solve the trailing profiles to go to profile end and we'll do the same thing here we'll set this to 3.9 oh no and we'll set this to 0.1 oh no that's not working so let's uh let's solve this how do we solve this I've got to set this Dimension to B 3.9 there we go and set this one the 0.1 also should work nope because I selected the wrong one what am I doing okay select this and the upper one there sorry so that's a 0.1 so that's just shifted everything forward there and now if we click ok behold it has improved things but not 100 and the reason for that is most likely to do with the upper rail because indeed it doesn't match let's go to rail upper reveal the profile end up that's in the right place so what is the issue let's go back into here and see what it's all happy with the rails do not insect intersect all profiles ah because that has slid out so what we do go to the upper Rail and we need to move this back to where it needs to be same with this one click ok finish the sketch and there we have it we now have the blades much further away from each other coming out of the Hub so we can hide our profiles again let's try doing the thing let's add a fillet to these oop not there select the form click fill it one it's okay and then we'll pull this down by two using the offset tool now we have a by Loop based off the exact triloop design with some smaller modifications and that I think is pretty much it I'm not going to mirror this so that was exhausting this is like the third attempt to get through this but I think that worked out not too bad but remember again I'm not a professional I'm not very good with Fusion 360. I scrape by as you can see but if you're a much more talented person then you've probably found flaws of my methodology and maybe ways to improve upon it or maybe you prefer to use surface modeling that's up to you if you are at that if you're at that level if you're not at that level that you're actually looking to me for help then I hope this has helped you but I do urge you to look into more Fusion 360 tutorials that are more specific on various methods for doing things there's a lot of propeller tutorials that use surface modeling for example so by all means have a look at them and maybe develop your own methodology to doing all of this but that is about it so if you found this video useful please like and share maybe buy me a coffee if you feel like it uh there's a link down in the description if you have any questions or suggestions regarding the whole thing then you know leave a comment down below and of course Please Subscribe for more content like this maybe even check out some of my older tutorials like the first one where I made some GoPro mount for your drone you measure things yourself and if you did use this video to help you create your own design and you think your design could be a decent performer then please share with the wider Community as a whole let us know tag me if you feel like it and of course you know if you want to give a bit of credit to how you learn to do it that's always nice but anyway thanks again for watching and hopefully I'll see you again when I finally got my own toroidal props printed in flame [Music] seriously I got liar hard than steel and muzzles arrived so and the filament's drying the printer so this will be this will be printing very very soon

Channel: STRIKING FPV

Views: 22,266

Keywords: FPV, Cinewhoop, Drone, DJI, Ashton Lawson, Drones, Quadcopters, STRIKING FPV, Toroidal Propeller, DIY, Fusion 360, MIT, STRIKING FPV R&D, Tutorial, Guide, 3D Printing, FDM, Resin, SLS, DJI FPV, STL, Thingiverse, Award Winning, RD100, R&D 100, Innovation, SLA, Prototype, Prototyping, Prop Design, Propeller Design, Cinewhoops, FPV Community, Propeller, Prop, Toroidal, Bi-Toroidal, Tri-loop, Bi-Loop, Triloop, Biloop, Printables, Fusion 360 Tutorial, Toroidal Propeller Tutorial, Step by Step, How To

Id: UUPffl7JxKw

Length: 56min 51sec (3411 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2023