Carbon fibre prop

Had great success with printed props only breaking 2 so far. However, always worrying it will let me down miles from shore so have used the 3d print to mould a carbon fibre prop. This has been moulded straight from pacificmeister design. Now working on new design as it is really strong so can make much thinner and more efficient.

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Very nice piece of work :ok_hand:
When is your first test on water ? For the same propeller, do you think you coiuld measure the max speed (GPS logger) difference between 3D printed solution and carbon moulded solution ?

Great! I´m also thinking of 3d printing a mold the prop so I can make it thinner and maybe more durable.
What do you about the sharp corners on these props? If you look at boat props they have rounded tips.
Also I´m thinking of making the hub bigger so the root of the blades get a more rigid. Maybe the inner part of the blades on the PM-prop does not have any effect because they are directly behind motor/gearbox housing 50-60 mm. When I look a pictures of Lifts prop it seems to be around 50 mm.

Could it be a good feature to let prop blades flex a little bit so it will act like a spring and reduce the sudden torque/current when accelerating?

Will do but winter settling in here so will have to wait till spring.

Hi great job! I did myself build dozens of 3d printed propellers and reinforced them with CF some with very interesting efficiency. Then I tried once to print a mold but I totally failed…
Can you detail a bit the building process please? Thank you

I think virus has a video about that.

Yep but molding with latex (if I remember correctly), an interesting technique I want to see is directly 3d print the mold

Not sure a printed mould is the way to go. I printed the prop filled and sanded with fairing compound and cast a mould from this. Am in the process of making a thinner bladed one along with duct now so will post photos of the process.

Good thank you can’t wait!

Hey MP105!
Awesome results with printing molds for your prop! We’re currently working on a software tool which designs a prop for us! This with the help of Matlab and a lot of simulations.

After the design process we import the design into Solidworks and then create a mold for it. After this, we print the mold with just plain PLA. We know there are better alternatives, but this has always worked for us.

The software tools also creates the laminate for us, since we don’t have access to all the facilities we need to work with prepreq, we use wet layup.

We now made a couple of props and we’ve noticed a significant amount of stiffness between the use of plain carbon and UD carbon fiber.

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Wow your getting great results with the printed mould. The finish looks really good my printer wouldn’t leave a finish like that. I come from a boat building background and when we cast bronze props we always made a model of the prop which was used for the casting.

Very nice piece of work. I think you are going to be copied :wink:
I should be interesting to apply this method with three 120 degree pieces joining to build a three-blade prop, a bit like @virus does. Making the mold parametric would be an interesting challenge for @Taylor :wink:
How do you make the central core ?

The printed prop and boss are hot glued o a sheet of acrylic then the space under the blades is built up using plastersene which is a non drying modeling clay. Once smoothed out you can apply silicone moulding rubber then an epoxy case.

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Now onto carbon duct. Just taking outer ring out of mould.

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