QUADMOVR Flies a Carbon Quadcopter Drone on Four Printed Radial Impellers

QUADMOVR is no stranger to designing, printing, and flying self-built quads, and their latest experiment swaps every propeller for a 3D printed centrifugal wheel that lives inside its own vaned case. Each unit starts as a 60 mm PETG impeller that bolts to a standard T-mount motor with two M2 screws. A matching 90 mm housing, 28 mm tall, sandwiches between the motor and the carbon arm so the spinning wheel sits inside a 0.3 mm gap. Air enters through the open center on top. Curved vanes fling it outward the way a shop blower does. Fixed vanes in the case then turn that radial blast downward, which is how four of these assemblies lift a plain movr200cp2 X frame.

Files appeared on MakerWorld in May as a modified version of Baba’s 2024 “drone radial Impeller Propeller,” a project he had previously worked on, but with some extra bits added to get them to fit properly with NewBeeDrone FLOW 2004 motors – particularly when it comes to mounting, stiffness, and cable routing. The video credits acknowledge Felix Niessen, the original designer of the impeller. If you plan to print them, use PETG, 0.16 mm layers, five walls, and no infill, and leave them just as they come out of the printer, with no extra balancing or cleaning required. Although the tolerances are rather precise, you may need to do some little sanding before they round neatly, and printing the two plates takes approximately 7 hours.

It’s the same airframe, flight controller, and battery pack, with only two different rotors and the same Fettec 35 A AIO and 6S 550 mAh pack. But with the printed impellers, the quad weights 189 grams without the battery. When you swap in some high-quality three-blade props, the weight reduces to 141 grams. Each impeller weighs 15.7 grams, compared to 2.9 grams for a standard prop. Putting all that extra mass and surface area through the air, as well as the extra turn the air must make to get to the prop, all cost you hover time, but as the flight footage shows, the quad can still climb, translate, and perform the same acrobatic moves as before, despite not having GPS or self-leveling. A side-by-side comparison with a quad using standard props demonstrates the difference in efficiency. Some people have even described the propellers as having a “jet-like” noise, while being quieter than a pair of open blades.

In terms of safety, one of the practical advantages of these printed impellers is that the housing wraps around the working parts to protect them, much like the protective rings on early toy quads. Although none of this is a finished product yet, as QUADMOVR even labels it experimental, Baba stated in his original listing that the motor height, wheel-to-duct alignment, and KV all need to be relatively close for this to fly successfully. Some pilots who tried an older 60 mm version discovered it would simply sit there shaking if anything was wrong, while at least one person tested the 60 mm version on a heavier 5-inch quad and witnessed pieces break under strain.

The print files for this project are freely accessible under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, so if you have a competent FDM machine and a T-mount 2004, you can try it. Of course, ordinary three-blade props still prevail in terms of weight, inertia, and how little energy is wasted while rotating air twice. These printable impellers demonstrate that you can create a real FPV quad with a printed centrifugal wheel in a vaned shroud that can stay in the air long enough to fly in the same way as QUADMOVR flies everything else.
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