Occasionally it pays to post twice in a day, as I do here after a reconfiguration around the corners. Stubs for mounting motors are replaced by plinths and undercarriage legs are omitted, so that the outline of the drones is matching. It reduces the parts count, and improves ground-stability and general aesthetic: as a devotee of Apple I've always valued form and function equally. As important is the means of construction, and the use of stock product has meant that reiterative prototyping has been cost-effective as well as ecologically sound, beside eminently doable.
For those motor-mounts for instance I've switched back to sixteenth-gauge aluminium because it is more easily removable from the tube connectors ~ whereas those plastic sections that you see in black are so tight a fit as to require removing with a mallet. In fact at shorter lengths it can prove impossible to separate the two, in which cases you can steam them for a minute or two on the hob and let expansion do the trick.
This is nothing new in aviation: vital connections like the bearings that support 'swing-wings' are so tight a fit that they are cooled in liquid nitrogen at point of assembly so as to contract them sufficiently enough to fit. Fortunately more of us have a cooker to hand in the kitchen than, say, a liquefaction generator.
The 'tower' is made of metre-length tubes and I've retained a foot-square foot-print as a leftover from previous versions; as this is a half-scale prototype you and I would normally be looking at two-feet square. At the full-scale though I might switch to a half-metre (20"), because sheet material is often retailed in metric here in Europe...
...but mainly because it'll look more Marvel-ous.
