Depron Heinkel HE162

After much thinking I have decided the next plane will be the HE 162.

It will small enough to be a 'one piece' plane which makes the most of the lightweight Depron construction. It will be built using some of my stock of 2mm Depron with some significant printed parts.
As I did with the Airbus A350 and the Antonov AN124 I will start with the fan diameter or rather the 3x3.5 4 blade prop (or 76.2 mm diameter) and everything is scaled from that!
The bit that has to be accurately made is the motor mount and the duct around it.
By placing the motor and prop as far back as possible in the BMW 003 'pod' it allows best use to be made of the scale exhaust cone feature and still enables an 85% FSA area nozzle.
The first 'trial' printed exhaust and motor mount assembly.


The printed part will just be the duct. The final outside shape will be in Depron.
It weighs 48.1 g.
The intention is for the complete duct from inlet bell mouth to exhaust cone to be printed and joined together. It will then form a 'keel' from which the rest of plane will be built.
Well that the plan.
Actually this is the only bit of plan so far!

It will of course be a hand launch/belly lander.

Excellent stuff, following with interest Simon, I think it's a lovely shaped aircraft.

Looking forward to this build. I would be interested to know what the effect of having such a high thrust line will be ?

Watching this with interest, you usually crack along with your builds so it won't be long before it all comes together.

High thrust line?
It will have a fairly modest thrust to weight ratio, maybe as low as 50% which is pretty low for an EDF so it will rely on the good aerodynamics. Hopefully what ever problems there might be will be modest.
I have a number of pushers with serious thrust to weight ratios so the effects are not unknown to me.

What I mean is; how will having the EDF mounted high on the fuselage affect the way it fly's. Might be a dumb question but I would still like to know.

Crash
When I said pushers I did mean they have a high thrust line and yes open the throttle smartly at slow speed and the nose goes down. Not clever to apply full power on a last minute 'go round'. With sufficient speed the effect is largely unnoticeable.
In fact with a high mounted pusher it is simply not possible put in the necessary down thrust as you can with a tractor to stop the normal 'pitch up' with speed effect.
The end result a high mounted thrust does cause a temporary nose down pitch with throttle but a reduced (or even zero) pitch up effect with speed.
Just as with a tractor the thrust to weight ratio has a significant role in the degree of effect of the thrust line/CofG relationship.

In CAD I have 'assembled' the complete printed duct from bell mouth to exhaust. It is long!

In fact 607 mm long and made up of 12 parts glued together.
It will take the best part of 10 hours to print it all but with so many parts alteat the effect of a 'print failure' is not too severe.

As it's parallel for most of its length surely it would be easier/ quicker to use a rolled tube, I've got loads of 1/64 ply if you need it although card would do it..

You may be right but one advantage of a printed structure is it holds it shape free standing with no internal stresses and if I used ply I would not be able to say it has no wood in it!

Much easier to use a tube ....and stronger..and quicker to construct, I'm all for experimentation but why make life difficult?
I'd make the whole thing from wood....as per the real thing but that's just me!

Wood like the original?
But following that principle an awful lot of model planes would have to be made of aluminium or steel.

No Depron yet but the the motor mount and duct are printed and shown against the plan at full size.

I think the best way forward would be to build the engine pod by cladding the duct with a Depron structure.
The rest of the plane could be built 'stand alone' and the pod simply glued on top.

There is a huge amount of space above the duct, probably big enough to get the battery in but all that weight so high up would be asking for trouble so 'battery in the cockpit' is most likely.

ok ok I take it all back, that duct looks wonderful! wonder if you could hide the rx and Speedo up there? battery in the cockpit sounds logical to me.

A short video of the 'flight' quality duct under test.

It is only running on a 2s for the test. At full power it draws 1.8A, that's just 13W!
A 20A 6s one is on order.

The next stage is very slow going converting the rather crude 3 view into some workable full size drawings.
Concentrating on the turbine pod at the moment.

This is just a screen short. The actual file is a full size drawing.
Once I have the complete pod former set drawn I cut them out in 2mm Depron and complete the pod. It should be relatively simple as apart from the one piece duct tube it will have nothing else to be built in with just the motor wires sticking out the bottom.

The fuselage has many more formers so will take even longer to prepare the plan.

Simon, make yourself a pantograph, makes jobs like scaling easy, I love mine.