I think there was a time a dude did this for real on a Cessna and crashed it as the part almost immediatly failed.
Unless you have a metal 3D print, or can print in exotic ultra strength materials, you just can't do this.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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I think even if you have a metal 3d printer, it would still not be suitable for anything where strength of the piece is critical. Iirc, metal 3d printing basically just joins metal filings together using some kind of medium, making is no much weaker than a forged or machined piece.
They use a laser to melt the top layer of a bed of metal powder, lower the bed, spread more powder, repeat. It results in a generally more porus part than cast or forged material, thus weaker, but can make otherwise impossible to manufacture geometries that can be lighter weight, which can reduce the strength requirements as well. A jesus nut is not an application you skimp on strength lol
F1 teams 3D print (laser metal sintering more specifically) their pistons these days, so I'd say at the bleeding edge of the tech you can create pretty strong parts. But indeed, anything which a consumer is likely going to be able to afford won't be nearly as strong.
They also are likely to rebuild and throw away with every race
No that's been banned for a while at this point. They get allocations for components on the car, in the case of the combustion engine 3 for the season.
The reasonable way would be to do the prototype with a 3D printer, create a mold and cast the metal. This wouldn't work here either, but if you already have the CAD/CAM file you could just get it milled by a professional CNC outfit. If you're not too cheap with the steel, it might not even kill you and still cost less than $1600. OTOH, if you can afford a helicopter that shouldn't be an argument for you. Half an hour in the air will cost you more than that.
IIRC: It was a 3D printed intake using those carbon fiber filaments that aren’t really carbon fiber. However the main failure was the assumption that the intake wouldn’t get hot, but it did.
"I didn't even have to make the CAD file myself. Just prompted GPT to generate it for me."
You now have the world’s first single use helicopter
Helicopters freak me the fuck out.
At least planes can glide if the engines die.
If a helicopter fails, you're dropping like a stone.
I have flown in helicopters most of my career, and we regularly did auto-rotation emergency drills, where we cut the engines output back (to simulate dual engine failure) and then "glide" to a particular spot, using the air pressure from descent to drive the blades.
With a good pilot, you just kind of go zero-g for a second or two, and the. A somehwat faster than normal descent, followed by a big flare (tail down, nose up, like a diving bird pulling back and fanning its wings out) at around 80 feet, then quick (less comfortable) drop to the deck.
With a good pilot, it's mildly uncomfortable, with a mediocre pilot, it's some back pain and some extra maintenance inspections, but you aren't crashing.
100% well said. However, imo the biggest problem is doing this when failure actually happens over any terrain that isn't flat for several hundred yards.
Engine failure while flying through mountains doesn't provide enough room to descend and pull back up.
So recovering from critical failure is very dependant on the enviroment the pilot is flying in. Just wanted to add that on, as Helos are imo, basically designed to enter and exit the worst environments out there, making it difficult to counter mechanical issues even with proper training.
Our pilots, with training, regularly can get to inside a circle patch of flat land 100 ft in diameter. They generally pick a very specific spot on the runway (like the numbers) and then aim to end up there. And they practice straight down, 90 degree left, 90 degree right* 180 degree, and on occasion 360 degree (for when the spot you want is directly below when your engines fail, and feels like you are corkscrewing to your doom). Obviously practice is different than an actual emergency, but I felt confident the pilots could get us down safely in the event of a dual engine failure.
So honestly if it's over mountainous areas, I'd rather be in the helicopter looking for a place to hard land than a fixed wing aircraft (that needs a runway or at the very least a long grassy field with no obstructions).
Good point between the two! I'd prefer being in neither if there was engine failure over mountainous terrain haha.
Imo, the biggest difference between the two is that fixed wing aircraft have a lot more time available to them to correct for a case of complete engine failure. While it would still be an issue over mountainous areas, the plane would certainly have more time to glide and find a place to land imo. (Assuming it's at a higher altitude than a helo would normally travel). Not that this would make it easier or anything. Just that the total amount of time you have to correct for an engine failure is far greater in a fixed wing craft then a helo, generally speaking.
That being said, the training you're mentioning is excellent, and I have nothing but respect for Helo pilots. If anything, they have to be more dialed in than fixed wing pilots as there's a lot more that can go wrong quickly. So likewise, the training needed to be a good Helo pilot far exceeds the training needed to be a good fixed wing pilot. (At least imo). To that end, I would 100% rather be in a Helo with engine failure as it's far more likely the pilot actually knows what to do, and is trained for it too 😉
Not really, the autorotation makes the blades behave like a parachute, so you can also glide down gently. You need blades to be heavily damaged for it to fall down like a stone, same with planes when the wings fall off.
Also, a plane gliding to a landing still needs a pretty large, clear area to touchdown and come to a stop safely. Helicopters landing using autorotation need far less space.
I've never once seen a helicopter crash that looked anything at all like it was falling with a parachute.
That's because the helicopter crashes you've seen were the ones where something catastrophic happened, like a midair collision or a pilot error. That's what makes the news, not the safe landings where engine failure has occurred.
The crashes you seen had their tail damaged.
An auto rotation isn't a crash. An auto rotation can end up as one but usually looks like a normal landing
Not entirely,auto rotation and so,but yeah,helicopters are just machines working really hard not to explode at random
What's the term I heard about helicopters? Something along the lines of:
A helicopter is 1000 moving parts all conspiring to kill you? Something like that.
I like James May's description
A plane elegantly uses the laws of physics to fly. A helicopter just beats them into submission.
Or something like that.
It'll work for the rest of your life!
Only if you’re otherwise unlucky, as you’re not leaving the ground
It'll break before it gets of the ground.
As someone who tests materials and parts like this for a living, I can look at that part and say with 100% certainty that it will last for a period of time.
Nanoseconds are technically a period of time, yes.
I think we can get a bigger number if we just measure in femtoseconds. And bigger number is better.
Funny joke, but before anyone assumes this is real and criticizes the print quality:
Both of these photos are edited from the picture on the Wikipedia page for the rotor retaining nut. The one on the right doesn’t even look like a real 3D printed part: the lines on the top surfaces aren’t parallel, in addition to it being incredibly messy overall.
It's almost like it's a joke
Yes, but this has been posted a couple times before, and people always act like it’s real. Instead of responding to any of the folks here, I figured I’d just make my own comment.
It might not be a joke. There are metal materials and a specialized printer that you need like 370C for. My Ender can only run up to like 260C. Generally you would need to clean them up with a grinder after printing
It's a joke.
But also, there are other, better forms of metal printing. One is to use metal powder and laser-weld it layer by layer. Another is basically using a wire welder essentially the same way you would use an FDM printer.
That is probably what those printers are. I have welded with a wire feed and that cog would be pretty hard to make. I would just drill after for the hole I think
The image is a poorly executed FDM 3D print stylized version of the image Wikipedia image I posted, and metal 3D printing costs much more than the few cents quoted in the tweet.
Even if you were to 3D print the nut in metal, it wouldn’t be as strong as the machined original due to porosity and such, and being as that is the nut that holds the helicopter rotors to the helicopter, making it weaker would be very ill advised.
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Thank you for this.
At least if that was PLA (and not a Photoshop job) there's be no risk of it failing mid-flight. Because it would rip to shreds the second torque was applied to it.
That is the most awful 3d print I have seen in my entire life. And I have seen benchys printed my cheap prusa clones.
How did they even manage to finish the print with filament chunkier than a homeless persons cum and bipolar ahh nozzle temperature
I think it might actually be photoshopped to look like a print, because that's the same picture that's on the Wikipedia page for Jesus Nut, with the same hand, background, and shadows, except on Wikipedia it's obviously a metal part. I spent way too long comparing them trying to figure out if they shopped a 3D print over the real one or colored and textured it to look like a print, and I think it's the latter.
So it's a quality meme? Nice
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