by Dennis De Fevere
03/23/2002

I have been playing around with the EDF-50 to see if I can get a little better performance out of it.  As you can see from the photo, I have added an inlet ring and a tail cone.  The inlet ring added 13% to the thrust and the tail cone added another 12%.  I am now getting 91 grams of thrust at 7.2 Volts.

For the ring, I just used some scrap PVC plastic that was left over from another project, but many other plastics would work as well. The ring was machined, on a lathe, from a piece of PVC plastic 3 in. by 3 in. by 1/4 in. thick. There is nothing special about PVC, any hard plastic will work just fine.  Plastics such as Nylon, Plexiglass, Lexan, Delrin, etc. would all work just as well. Tap Plastics is a good source of material for the ring.  The tail cone was made of balsa and glued to a short length of 1/2 in. diameter brass tubing, which fits perfectly over the back end of the motor. Click here to download the drawing in JPG format.

I can't wait to try out the A-10 with 25% more thrust! By the way, the EDF-50 is much quieter with the inlet ring and tail cone.

The following is a picture of the A-10 with two EDF-50 units before the above modifications and it flew beautifully on 02/25/2002. Picture was taken by David Hsu.