Drone or Phone?

There's nothing I can see in the guidelines for this competition that says anything about open rotors and their potential effect on either operator or bystanders and as we pointed out to Gwen last Friday, aeroplanes have used unguarded propellers since Leonardo and while many people have been killed by inadvertent contact with them, they still pass muster with every aviation authority in the world.

Useful parallels are cars, knives or (especially if you're American), guns. The first kill more people worldwide than any other means, followed by knives in places like London or guns in the USA. Nobody suggests doing away with them however because their utility outweighs the risks. But they were all introduced centuries ago and in a more litigious age products must be bullet-proof from the outset.

This has the interesting side-effect of steering people into dangerous pastimes like climbing high-rises without ropes, or launching themselves in wing-suits. We're here to build though and not philosophise, and I agree to the casual observer our wearable drones look like the sort of props magicians use to cut their assistants in half.

I have therefore decided to split the component drones again and mount one at the base and the other around the midriff. They'll be supported by a frame like that originally envisaged for the  'flying phone-box' so that once again the constraints of competition have steered us toward the safe and narrow.

On this note I get on with searching for parts, the pursuit of projects involving the trawl of internet and industrial units as it does. One such ends here where a vital part is described variably as aluminium or steel, which are metallurgically worlds apart, and more expensive the more you buy?

They say the website will be amended to reflect, but you know it never will, because that's life.