The Voyage of the Quadcopter

Sean has been interested in building a quadcopter for years. A quadcopter is just a fancy name for a drone with four propellers. He's been acquiring parts and slowly building the structure on his 3D printer. He'll be really interested and work hard on it for a couple of weeks, then lose interest and put it away for six months. This is been going on for about two years. He finally pulled out all of the parts and motors and put it all together and finished it this summer.

He took the kids outside with him for the maiden voyage (I was gone at the time). It flew around and they all had a great time with it. Then when I got home he took me outside to show it to me. It flew well for a few minutes before he lost it behind a tree. He tried to fly it safely away from the tree but failed and stuffed right into a huge oak tree by the house. He hadn't installed the beeper yet that tells you where it is so we had no idea where in the tree it was.

It did have four little lights on each prop but it wasn't near dark and we weren't sure the batteries would hold up until it got dark enough to see them. Luckily they held out and we found it way up high in the tree.

Sean tried throwing a football at it to dislodge it with no luck. He then tried a bow and arrow with a string tied on in hopes of catching the limb and shaking it. Still no luck. The last resort was to climb the tree and try shaking the limb. Didn't work. We had a storm moving in and had to work fast to save it before the rain destroyed the electronics. He ended up taking a saw up there, locating the branch it was on and sawing off the branch. That worked to dislodge it. I stood under it and tried to catch it but failed and it hit the ground hard breaking off a couple of propellers.

He printed off more arms and replaced the broken propellers and got it back in the air......just in time to slam it into the fence sheering off several vital parts. Poor little quadcopter.