Via hackaday
[Robert] once built a quadcopter frame by sawing laminate floor tile. It worked, we’re taking the lack of pictures of this build as evidence of how ugly it was. His latest design used a much better looking material – laser cut plywood – and the finished product is very strong and lightweight, even compared to commercial frames made with glass or carbon fiber and epoxy.
Although the design went smoothly thanks to some Solidworks skills, actually cutting the frame from 3mm birch ply resulted in a few issues. The cheap laser cutter used for cutting include some bottom of the line software called LaserWorksV5. There is a kerf compensation feature, called ‘sew compensation’ in the software’s native Chinglish. The software would always crash whenever it tried to calculate the compensation for circles. [Robert] spent two hours figuring this problem out, and in the end needed to break out a piece of sand paper to get a nice interlocking fit.
The completed frame bolts together without any glue at all, and the best part about it is the weight – only 167 grams. Compare that to a similarly sized glass fiber frame, and [Robert]‘s shaved at least 200 grams off his finished build.
Comments
I usually do laser-cutted plywood frames for my multicopter frames, and yes, it's light and cheap, and has the added benefit of dampening the vibrations as the wood is flexible. But it's not the best for strength, sometimes I have to replace parts of the frame after a hard landing, but it's so cheap that I can bear with that.
I cannot say for sure how good the strength is,but i have used balsa ply for the firewalls in many a nitro plane.Although the ground doesn't care what its made of :)