Apparently a Dremel Can Fly Like a Helicopter

Every maker should have a good rotary tool and Dremel is the best-known brand of the bunch — so much so that it has become genericized like Kleenex and Q-tips. Like all all rotary tools, Dremels rely on high speed (rather than torque) to grind, sand, cut, or polish material. It isn’t uncommon for Dremel models to have max speeds over 30,000 RPM. That speed is pretty similar to what we see from hobby drone motors, which got Peter Sripol wondering if a Dremel could fly. To test the idea, he built this Dremel-driven helicopter.

As Sripol points out in his introduction, it would be cheating to simply pull the motor out of a Dremel and use that to drive the rotors. That would just be using an electric brushed motor with extra steps. Sripol wanted a challenge, which meant making the entire Dremel tool (case, chuck, and everything else included) fly. Sripol is no stranger to flying machines and has built a plethora of them—including many manned aircraft that he has piloted himself. But this wasn’t an easy undertaking. Using the Dremel to drive the propeller of a plane wouldn’t have been too hard, but a helicopter requires a much greater power to weight ratio and that is tricky with a heavy Dremel tool.

For obvious reasons, Sripol started with a battery-powered Dremel (an 8220 model). That has a max RPM of 30,000, but weighs a hefty 1.36 pounds. The first step was to construct a lightweight frame out of steel rod and wood. That uses the structure of the Dremel itself to provide support in order to keep the weight down as much as possible. The purpose of the frame is simply to add landing gear and the stabilizing tail section.

A helicopter’s rotors are more complex than a regular ol’ propeller. Normally they allow for adjustments like blade pitch angle, but Sripol 3D-printed a simplified version that uses counterweights to tilt the rotor blades and that gears down the output from the Dremel. He also added a small tail rotor motor and a servo motor to actuate the Dremel’s built-in speed control dial.

It required several rounds of testing, crashing, and rebuilding, but eventually Sripol was able to build a working helicopter powered by the Dremel. Nobody would claim that it flies as well as an aircraft built with purpose-designed components, but that doesn’t matter. The Dremel flew and that is cool.