Bell X-22 – 3D printed

I’ve been hiding away working on design and concepts for a Bell X-22. There are no plans that I could find. I’ve been working off of a cut-away drawing, some really simple 3 views (likely from a model), and lots of video clips (which I have freeze-framed). I also came across some photos from when the X-22 was in a museum in downtown Buffalo, N.Y., but alas they moved the museum to the airport and the bird sits in parts in storage.

My plan was to use 4 x 28mm motors each with around 200W of power with a 10 x4.7 prop. I have two such motors on my Versa Wing VTOL , AUW 1200g. The VTOL headed for the sky like a bat out of hell with those two motors, so I figure (without doing all the math) that if I can get the X-22 to come in around 2400g – 3000g , it will still be able to hover with those motors. I’m not done with the Versa-wing VTOL yet, I put thrust vectored motors on to see if I could make it more wind-resistible – but I’m hearing this is not so easy with a tail-sitter.

I had also made a good start with my Quad tilt wing WASP, but alas, too much weight for any reasonable hover and it burned through a battery in no time. But I learned about 3D printing as I made PLA tilts with PLA bearings for that machine.

Enter the Bell X-22. A friend sent a picture and said “why don’t you build one of these”. Challenge accepted.

Then I thought, can I 3D print this, as a semi-scale model and make it work with OAVTOL ? We’ll see…

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