It's here!
The part we have dreamed about!
Ian: It's been on order for three months
And we finally have it
These are definitely not the edible kind.
Ian: Only one way to find out
Come on
My god, its huge!
How heavy is it? I want to say 2.4 kilograms
At least 5 pounds
Follow us on Instagram! It's a rocket!
Why
You need something to do
Alright, so if you guys are new to this series, we've been attempting to fly like Iron Man for ooh
almost
Two years now since 100,000 subscribers basically
What happened was when our YouTube channel was very small we set a little goal that if we broke a hundred thousand subscribers
We would start this ambitious project to try and fly like Iron Man!
So for our hundred thousand subscriber milestone
We actually said we would try and do a project to fly like Iron Man
Now obviously that is a really really ambitious project and has taken us a long time
Just to get where we are today and the big issue obviously is
funding because
Flying is difficult, but flying in a compact way is even more expensive. You can build a giant quadcopter
They could lift a human for probably under $20,000 if you want to try and shrink that down to like a tiny jetpack
The cost just skyrockets so
what we're trying to do is slowly build up a system and get used to flying and we're basically going to start by building a
Larger version of what we hope to shrink down in the future now in our earlier videos
We use what we thought were some of the largest EDFs that you could actually purchase and these put out about eight kilograms of thrust
Thanks to all of our sponsors
We were able to buy what we now know is the largest EDF you can buy and that's the Schubeler 195 millimeter diameter
EDF and this thing puts out 24 kilograms of thrust
Now in order to actually test this and make sure it can put out 24 kilograms of thrust
We've got this little thrust test jig that we built for our homemade EDF in an update a few videos ago
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna mount this on here
Hook up the new speed controller
which you can see is absolutely massive compared to what we're using before and
Then we'll be able to spin it up and see if it actually produces that 24 kilograms of thrust
Goodbye washer it's by your sock
Socks and sandals on video, that's that's a risky move. Let's see if it pays off
So now we're gonna install a new speed controller just a little bit bigger not too much bigger
What a crappy ziptie!
And now for something completely different,
On this episode make it real, I'm going to show you how to style your hair, just like Captain America
Once your hair is nice and wet you're gonna need an industrial hair dryer
And boom! You've got Captain America's hair!
All right so before we decide to use this in our future design
We need to test to make sure it's actually up to the manufacturers spec
So as we've shown before we built a little thrust test jig with a little Arduino
That's going to keep track of how much thrust this actually produces the other big thing
we're testing here is my confidence level in being anywhere near this when it's running because
That is the ultimate plan to strap these to my body somehow, so let's let's see how confident I feel. here we go
All right so right now we have it set to a maximum of a 30 percent throttle. Let's see what that's like
Not bad now let's go up to full throttle
Somehow don't feel safe standing right next to it. I don't know if I feel safer like over here
So my confidence level so far is not very high
All right, so we've got the data on the Arduino from that test now
It sounds really impressive, but let's let's throw some stuff into the wind stream and see what that looks like so
Maybe not 100%
Didn't blow that far yeah, the jet engine looked a bit cooler when we throwing balls in front of it
All right now to visualize the flow of air that's actually going through the EDF right now we have a little surprise
It's called a smoke grenade
Got a bit dusty in there
All right now we've tested the jet engine and the shoe blur well and our homemade EDF
We can start deciding what we actually want to use for the project
Now the most economical option would of course just be using giant props, but like we said earlier
We don't really want to go down this road because we'll just end up with basically a giant
quadcopter
After giant props the next most economical option is the jet engine
The jet engines produce about thirty four kilograms of thrust and cost roughly about three to four thousand dollars each
They're not as precise as an EDF, which means we can't control them quite as easily making it a bit difficult for VTOL application
That's not to say it's not possible, it's just the design we want to go with is going to be self stabilizing
Now people have attached jet engines to themselves before and successfully hovered, but again. We want to build a platform
That's intelligent and can
Automatically make sure the pilot is upright. Which is why we really want to use EDFs
but the problem is the EDFs are really really expensive the Schuebeler produces about twenty four kilograms of thrust
But it costs nearly six thousand dollars after import tax customs
And all those duties and whatnot but at that price point for those EDFs
I mean we'd probably need about eight of them at
Minimum to be able to have enough thrust weight to really be able to fly properly
You're looking at forty eight thousand dollars
Just there, which is crazy
And it's gonna be quite a while before we could afford that many EDFs to actually build this prototype
So to try and reduce that cost we did try designing our own EDF
The problem was the amount of engineering time that would have to go into the design to make it work would actually end up costing
Much much more than just buying them, so we're kind of back at square one
And we're not really going to pursue designing our own EDF and that being said one of our subscribers is
actually looking at designing their own 300 mil EDF
He's actually 3d scanned and upscaled a blade design from an existing EDF
Modified it in CAD 3d printed it and then coated in carbon fiber
And as you see he actually sent us a sample of one of the blades he built
That's pretty awesome
So as you can see he sent us one of the original 3d printed samples
But then what he did was he actually coated it in carbon fiber
Now carbon fiber is actually one of the few things we can't do here at hack Smith industries yet
but it's really awesome to see what is possible and it's definitely something we're gonna be looking into in the future as
Something that we'd like to be able to do in a house
anyways
If you guys want to see a detailed video on how this was actually made go check out and subscribe
to high voltage feathers on YouTube
We've put a link in the description below, and there'll be a link at the end of this video
And if he has success with this project
Maybe we'll be able to use his design in a future iteration of our project but in the meantime
Let's use AR technology to actually show you what our design might look like
So this is our preliminary design that we drafted up in SolidWorks as you can see it uses four jet engines and four Schuebeler
EDFs and will provide a considerable amount of thrust that would allow us to fly and
It would be able to self stabilize there we go
That's the approximate scale of the actual design as you can see it is pretty big
But it is a lot smaller than a giant quadcopter now obviously there are even smaller platforms out there
Notable one is the flyboard air which is really compact and works really well. The only issue is. That's a
$250,000 product if we're able to build something like this the cost would actually be just under sixty thousand dollars
Which is still a lot of money, but it's not a quarter-million. Well we hope you guys enjoyed that video
I know it was a rather quick update, but we thought some update was better than no update because right now
We're actually super busy with some other big projects in the shop and some new equipment
Which we're gonna be announcing very soon you guys want a hint on seeing what that is check us out on social media and don't
Forget to check out high voltage feathers on YouTube right there
Plus we'll be testing this soon