Designing the layout for the S900 and the Stalker required finding places where everything fit together. The first step was to compile all of the parts together. Since not all of the parts were in yet, we made some mock-up parts out of foam. This was useful for showing a rough layout for the various subsystems.

A foam CNC machine was very helpful in expediting making these mock-up parts. This CNC machine was also used by Patrick Dewane to make custom airfoils for the Stalker.

Parts for the Stalker are hard to come by, so if any break we could be in big trouble. To try and solve this problem, Patrick Dewane wanted to find out if he could make the parts himself. Through his research, Patrick found that the air brake on the Stalker is a standard design, the NACA 64-008A, so he set out to make one with a CNC foam cutting machine and an STL file he got from an airfoil database.

After hours of mucking around with the user-unfriendly control software and having to edit the gcode himself, he was finally able to cut out the airfoil. He then laid fiberglass on the airfoil, and after a little more paint and polish he had made a professional quality air brake.

3D printing is a very useful tool for quickly prototyping parts. In our initial prototyping we printed our parts in PLA, which is cheap and widely available. Though we wanted our final parts to be made of sturdier material, PLA is good for basic testing and making sure that the dimensions for parts are correct: It would sure suck if we ordered expensive, high quality parts, only to find that some measurement was slightly off, making the part useless.