Servoed Hammerhead: Servo and testout

Next, I mounted the servo. I routered away all of the front landing gear box, but after doing so, found out that the servo box was still too tall: the linkage rods would be flexed too far to get to the control +, and that was a problem. Luckilly, mounting the servo on the roof of the model would fit perfectly! The problem was how to mount it up there, it was all curves and wide open.. how to mount the servo in a way that it could still be twisted/removed? Greenstuff. Epoxy putty. I had a bunch, so started making a big block on each side of the servo, pinning it between the two in the floating open space where it needed to be. Before the epoxy completely set, I removed the servo, and let the stuff cure. Then, I cut away the excess, leaving just what was needed


Heres a good closeup of it all: the phillips screw visible on the control + is a handy little attachment I was happy to see I had space to mount: its a sliding set-screw sorta thing, allowing me to slide the rods and adjust on the fly, to make lining them up easier. LEDs were test-fitted, to make sure that there was room for everything planned. The linkage for the chin turret is seen , angled crossways, so the three things will spin the same direction.



Finally, I tried it out. Because I still wasnt absolutely sure the drones would actually spin when the rod went in or out... or just pop straight out. So I wasnt going to stop working on it until I could actually slap all the electronics together and give it a shot. I put burst cannons on all three turrets, to get a better feel for if theyre lined up or not.

Whew!! so it does spin! And looks awesome to boot!!

Servoed Hammerhead: Drone linkage

[grr I cant just cut/paste this whole project... this site doenst allow links to be pasted, or something, so I'm going to have to redo it all.]

I plan on using the curved cradle mount in the wing to hold the drone disk in place, since it covers approx 70% of the drones' circle. So, running on that assumption, I got right to work modifying the drones to accept the pushrods and also to have room for the pushrods motion.

I wanted to keep the mechanism that moves the drones invisible, so, notched out the side of the disks in the area where the rods will be. This was also a good place to have the rods go from the wings' point of view: this slot is right where the meat of the wing is.

Heres a sample layout of the rod, showing how it enters the circles area, and the vertical part (hard to see, sorry) is the hook, that will attach to the drone. At the moment its empty space, but the other piece of the drone will be where the hole actually goes. The hole will be directly to the read in the arc of the circle, and that will be the neutral position, to give the largest arc of movement in each direction.

Here the drone is assembled, and the hole is seen, with the rod sticking out. Some fine shaving and tuning was required to keep the rod pivoting in its hole smoothly, and to sweep through the midst of the drone and slot going smoothly as well. All of this was important; I wanted to avoid any binding of any sort.

This view shows the hole in the wing, and in general shows how everything is set up.

Here the rod is inside the hull, and the position of the holes, and the straight rods, is just about where I wanted it, to give the most room for the servo and its control +.