Playing With Peanut Props

I’ve been printing Peanut Props for about two years now, I guess.  I offer them for specific models that I have built, and most come with a Spinner of appropriate size and shape for the specific model.  These spinners are separate from the prop and must be cut, ground or carved to fit on the prop.

Peanut Corsair 3- and 4-bladed props, printed in black (no spinner for the Corsair)

There are advantages to this:  I can print the spinner in a specific color, saving the modeler from having to color the spinner to match his model colors.

Peanut BF-109 with a printed 3-blade, wide-blade prop with a red printed spinner that had to be notched to clear the blades and the clutch.

The disadvantage is that you have to fit the spinner to the prop and figure out a way to center it and hold it on.  To be clear, these are problems that modelers face with nearly any prop and spinner combo, but what if there was a better way?

I’ve been kicking this around in my head for awhile, and discussions with modeling and printing pal, Archie Adamisin helped clarify one path forward.  I had been trying to “delete” the prop arms from the spinner.  This would work, but would still require a small amount of carving to get the spinner to snap on.  Archie suggested that I print the spinner and prop together (he had sent me some props that did exactly this a year or so ago, so I knew what he meant).

I have now done two of these.  One for the Bellanca Aries (which has a tiny spinner), and one for a soon-to-be-prototyped WWII fighter.  Here are the results:

Bellanca 5″ prop (top) and WWII fighter 4.5″ prop (bottom) with printed spinners; caps are off.

Bellanca (top) and WWII fighter (bottom) with spinner caps in place

Bellanca prop showing clutch installed. This is VERY small: the diameter at the spinner split is 3/8″ and the prop shaft is 1/32″ music wire. The prop shaft will still need to be trimmed to clear the spinner cap.

These have the spinner split in two and the top part has a little ridge on the base that snaps into the lower part of the spinner (that is actually part of the prop).  I am also putting in a hole through the base of the spinner to allow the insertion of a Garami-style clutch.  Carving around this on a separate spinner is always difficult and can lead to wobbly spinners, if you are not very careful.

I haven’t fully decided yet, but I could supply these for all of the Peanut Props I now offer, but the caution is that the spinners will be printed in the same color as the prop (black or silver, depending on the application), leaving the coloring of the spinner to the modeler.

Technically it IS possible for me to print the spinner in a different color, but this makes the print time about 10 times as long (3.5 hours vs 20 minutes) and the amount of plastic used is also about an order of magnitude greater.  This is because color-swapping during printing takes a LONG time and uses a LARGE amount of plastic.

As always, any thoughts or comments are welcome!