Tricopter v2.6(no HV)

I based my first Tricopter off of David's 2.6HV except I will not be using the HV part of it which just means I will not use a 4s battery, I will just be using the good old 2200 3 cell. I also will not be using the carbon fiber booms as this is my first tricopter. Enough talk, Lets get started! 

 I am using 1/2" wooden booms for the arms. I will be using 35 cm for the front two arms, and a 37 cm piece for the back arm.

The rest of my components for the body of the tricopter. I bought the camera tray from the Flitetest store, but when I got it, I put the camera tray together before I realized I wanted to paint everything black and cover the wires with orange mesh. I also bought the tricopter body from Flitest's store.

Unfortunatly I didn't know that the camera tray came with six longer screws to use. I already went out to my local Lowes and bought 3m screws. So the longer screws holding the tray have the button style top where the screws that I bought are regular flathead screwdriver top.

Here are all the booms cut out and painted.

Since I am using 1/2" inch booms, and the tricopter body is made for 10mm booms. So I had to file out some of the wood to make it fit.

I put the back boom and camera tray together on the body.

Another shot focusing on the camera tray and body.

Here it is with all the booms on. Unfortunatly, the paint that I used for the arms stick pretty well to the frame so when I try to fold the arms back, they struggle and when they finally fold back, it makes a loud crack sound that makes it sound like the frame or the arms broke. So here is my solution below.

I took the arms out and sanded a portion down. Now they fold Very smoothly.

Here are just a couple for pictures of the completed frame.

I will be using my Spektrum DX8 so I will be using the AR610 receiver. It has two antennas and one of them has a pretty long cable. Im not looking for miles of range but I am looking to do FPV with it later so I do want some range.

For this build I am using NTM 28-26 1200kv motors and right off the bat I knew that I had a problem. The plate that you usually bolt down onto a plane wouldn't line up with the wood properly. So my final solution is that I would drill two holes where the holes on the plate would line up at on the wood and then I took two zip-ties for each hole. I wasn't sure how strong this would be but it is SUPER strong. It is strong when flying but when it gets in a crash, the zip-ties just break right off.

Next up is the yaw control. I am using the front steering mount that David uses on his tricopter. I am also using a digital, metal gear servo. As you maybe can see from the picture, the motor mount only covers over two holes of the yaw controller so I just tryed my best to bend and tighten down a couple of zip-ties. Again, I didn't think this would be strong but it is!

I put orange mesh on all the ESCs. I really like the color orange and when you put black and orange together, It makes an awesome color combination.

At first I had put the orange mesh over the servo wire but I had shoved all of the wire in the mesh leaving some of it crimped up. This disable the servo from working. So all I did was make the decision to make it look a bit more sloppy but hey, at least it works.

Here are all of my wires in either orange or black mesh. My whole goal with this was to make it look the least sloppy as I could. I think I did a pretty good job on it.

Heres what it looks like all all folded up.

Here it is completed. I think it came out pretty nicely. If people want it, I will put up a video of it in the air and my setup for the KK2.1 board. Thanks for reading.