Designing and drawing a classical (and for ever) wood propeller.

Do-It-Yourseft Project.

Propeller design make easy.
There are some modern software to desing a propeller, It is very interesting if you
want to design special propeller like ultra-high performance racing propellers with
supersonic tips or others, but a classical wood propeller don't need computational
models, All wood propeller have the same (approximate) structure and all propellers
have good performance about 95%.
The following table have all data you need to build a classical propeller, this data
dont have any units (mm, inch) it is a adimensional data, you can design any type
propeller with this table.
r/R Pitch distribution Chord/R Thickness/chord
(%) (% of nom. Pitch) (%) (%)
10.0 root-affected root-affected root-affected
20.0 61 13.9 43.7
30.0 78 15.1 31.4
40.0 91 16.8 25.5
50.0 97 17.8 22.2
60.0 100 17.7 20.3
70.0 101 16.4 19.1
80.0 101 14.0 18.2
90.0 101 11.5 17.3
100.0 100 8.2 16.7
Table 1.
Chosing your propeller parameters.
The only two parameters than you have to choice are diameter and pitch. It defines
completly the blade shape for a subsonic incompresible flow conditions, It mean than
any point of the blade (tips) must not exceed 1/3 of sound speed.
This table havent unit (mm, inch). We need to select the size of our propeller to
calculate our data, for example a 80-60 inch propeller, it means that our diameter is 80
inch and our pitch is 60 inch (the propeller move along 60 inch each revolution). This
propeller would work well with a 134 Hp at 2700 RPM propeller speed and 125
milles/hr airplane speed.
Making calculations for your propeller size.
H/D=60/80=0.75 nominal pitch
H/D distribution= Nominal H/D * Pitch distribution/100
Angle = arc tan (H/(2*Pi*R*(r/R))) = arc tan ((H/D)/(r/R)*Pi)

Propeller Diameter and Pitch
H/D
distribution Angle Chord Thickness
degree (mm) (mm)
D= 80 Inch
H= 60 Inch 0.461 36.3 282.6 123.5
0.586 31.9 307.0 96.4
H/D= 0.75 0.680 28.4 341.7 87.1
0.727 24.8 362.7 80.5
0.750 21.7 358.7 72.8
0.758 19.0 332.7 63.6
0.758 16.8 285.1 51.9
0.754 14.9 234.5 40.6
0.750 13.4 166.7 27.8
You can see that pitch is not constant all along the blade, there are some very old
props in early aviation days having "true helical pitch" which in itself is generally not
the best way to get max efficiency from a propeller.
Drawing your propeller.
We have to draw a diferent airfoil for each blade sections, we can also select two, tree
or more airfoils, for example, you can use MH126 (especific root propeller airfoil) for
20% and 30% sections, MH112 for 40% and 50%, etc. but we going to make a more
simple method.
The most easy way to get diferent seccions airfoil is to select unique airfoil along all
blade. There are hundreds of airfoils suitable for this aplication but I think it is beter to
make a sure choice, we going to select a old shape from the days of old airfoils like
Clark-Y, it is a classical airfoil used in a lot of propellers desing in the past, and also
used today for simple designs.
Clark-Y is a cuasi-flat bottom airfoil, Fisrt drawing shows Clark-Y with correct zero
angle of attack, but traditionally the angle of attack of flat propellers aifoils have been
meassured in relation to flat-botton, the pitch resulting is called geometrical pitch and
it is diferent to real pitch measures in relation to airfoil chord. Obviously, all old
resources about propeller design is expressed in this way, and last table too. When you
see in any propeller "80 x 60 inch", 60 is geometrical pitch. I think today it is used
because it is more easy to meassure existent propeller geometry in this way.

Then, we have to rotate to coindide flat bottom with horizontal line. Second drawing
shows rotated airfoil.
Next, we strech the airfoil to fit to table_2 chord and thinkness in mm, and then rotate
the scheched sections to get correct pitch distribution, the rotation anglee is in table_2
too.
then, we fit the resulting airfoils to the template, all gravity centers of airfoils cross
blue line. Notice than a lot of material is removed from root seccion. it have to be
rounded in the finishing work.