In the last two weeks, I had plenty of time to sit in front of Fusion 360 to design a few things, but no time to 3D print anything. As a result, I have a couple of almost ready projects. Yesterday I showed you 3D Printed Dualcopter Reloaded. Today I will show you 3D printed tricopter drone.

A tricopter drone is a type of multirotor aircraft that uses three rotors to achieve flight — typically arranged in a Y-shaped configuration. Unlike the more common quadcopters (which have four rotors), tricopters rely on a tilting rear motor controlled by a servo mechanism to manage yaw (rotation around the vertical axis

Last year I have designed and made a fully printable quadcopter frame called Isando. It was fun, but well… There are plenty quadcopter frames over there. Cheap and much stronger than anyone can print at home. But Tricopters? Good luck with that.

I’ve taken some of the parts of Isando Quadcopter frame, designed some more and here it is.

The most important part of any tricopter is, of course, the tail motor tilting mechanism. I had the following options:

• no bearings, just bushings
• single bearing and using the servo as a second support point
• two bearing and the servo is used only as a torque source, not support point

Guess which option I’ve chosen? Right… The tail will be quite heavy, so to somehow help with that, the rear motor has enough space to use 5-inch or 6-inch propeller. And the rest? The rest is quite standard:

• Standard FPV camera in the front
• 30.5mm hole spacing flight controller in a middle
• video transmitter and radio receiver just behind the flight controller
• ESCs on arms
• 5-inch props in front
• 5 or 6-inch props in the back

STL files and additional instructions are available on Thingiverse or as a single file download (download button just below). Use it as you wish and have a lot of fun!