Carbon airframes, CNC motor mounts, gimbals, ESCs, payload bays, and antenna housings for drones, eVTOL, and unmanned platforms. From a single proto frame to a 500-airframe production cell — built to your hover budget, not ours.
Hover time is downstream of every gram and every watt on the platform. These three tradeoffs are where 80 % of drone programs leave performance on the table — and where we add the most value early.
A 6 % stiffer frame buys you yaw-rate authority. The same 6 % usually costs you 12 g, which costs you 38 seconds of hover. We design the arm cross-section, layup schedule, and motor-mount geometry together — not in three siloed bids.
Bent motor shafts and unbalanced rotors broadcast a tone into your flight stack. We balance rotors to ISO 1940 G6.3, machine motor mounts with concentric bearing seats, and certify each frame on a shake table before it leaves the cell.
A perfectly engineered carbon airframe is a Faraday cage. We design antenna cut-outs, dielectric inserts, and ground-plane breaks into the frame at layup time — not as a retrofit after first flight test.
A modern UAV bill of materials pulls from carbon layup, CNC, sheet, IM, 3DP, and PCBA. You shouldn’t need six suppliers — every part below ships from a single FabDigit cell against a single drawing pack.
Aluminum and magnesium-alloy motor plates, gimbal yokes, gear bushings, and battery cradle mounts. ±0.025 mm flatness on the motor face so the rotor disk stays planar.
Learn more Airframe · arms · top platesPre-preg autoclave layup for arms, top + bottom plates, and monocoque payload bays. Twill 2×2 cosmetic finish or UD-stacked structural. Ply-by-ply traceability.
Learn more Propellers · prop guards · coversGF-PA66 propellers, V-0 PC prop-guards, ABS-PC top covers. Soft tooling for pilot, hardened steel for the next 50,000 props.
Learn more Brackets · ducts · jigsPA12 (SLS) for production-near brackets and cooling ducts. SLM AlSi10Mg for replicating a CNC motor mount when the tooling lead time hurts.
Learn more Flight ctrl · ESC · GNSS4 – 8 layer flight-controller boards, 4-in-1 ESCs with thermal-relief pours, GNSS / radio boards. ENIG / hard-gold finishes; conformal coat for outdoor flight envelopes.
Learn more Layup schedule · weight budgetPly-by-ply layup design, flight-budget modelling, FAA Part 107 / ASTM F3322 hardware compliance. We can co-locate for the duration of qualification.
Learn moreWorking ranges across recent UAV programs. The coatings row carries the moat: finishes restricted on US/EU lines that our partner cells still run routinely.
A composite of the X-class platforms we currently build for — 2 kg AUW, 38-minute hover, BVLOS-rated radio. Each callout is where the engineering trade-off actually lives.
CNC-machined anodised motor plate, bolt-pattern matched to the stator. Bearing seat machined integral so the rotor disk stays planar to ±0.02 mm.
UD-stacked carbon arm with 0/45 outer plies for torsion, 0/90 inner for bend. Co-bonded into a CNC aluminum collar at the body end.
8-layer FC with redundant IMU, ENIG finish, conformal-coated. Mounts on vibration-isolated standoffs so the platform-mode tone never reaches the IMU.
High-current ESC with thermally-relieved copper pours and a machined heat-spreader bonded to the top plate carbon for convective dissipation.
Monocoque carbon bay with a CNC-machined aluminum gimbal lock plate. ISO 9409-1 hand-tool quick-change pattern.
Injection-moulded GF-PA66 propeller, balanced to ISO 1940 G6.3. Hubs come pre-loctited with the rotor adapter.
Across the drone programs we ship, these six parts make up the majority of the spend. The spec ranges below are working envelopes — your drawing tightens them further.
Top + bottom plate, arm tubes, payload bay. Twill 2×2 cosmetic or UD-stacked structural. Autoclave-cured with ply-by-ply traceability.
Anodised aluminum or magnesium-alloy motor plate. Integral bearing seat machined in the same op as the bolt pattern.
2- or 3-axis gimbal yokes, integral motor-stator pocket, bearing cup pre-finished. Lightweight magnesium when the weight budget demands it.
High-current 4-in-1 ESC board. Thermal-relief copper pours, heat-spreader bonding pad on the top plate, conformal-coated as standard.
Monocoque carbon payload bay with CNC aluminum hard-points, optional dielectric window for forward-looking radio.
Injection-moulded ASA / PC antenna housings with co-moulded dielectric inserts and EMI grounding tabs.
Every drone program lives or dies on the hover budget. Pick a platform class to preset a sensible airframe, then nudge the sliders to see how mass and battery and motor-count cascade into hover time and range. The math is intentionally simple — same momentum theory we walk customers through on the second engineering call.
X-class precision surveying platform with payload + RTK + BVLOS radio. UD-stacked carbon monocoque, CNC inserts only at hard-points. 40 + min hover target.
Industry-typical ranges from recent engagements. Specific commitments land in your quote.
Carbon autoclave wins on stiffness-to-weight at every volume. CNC + bonded carbon hybrid keeps unit cost flat from 1 to 1,000 pcs. Stamped + welded chassis wins only above 5,000.
Three real airframe materials. Carbon UD wins on stiffness-to-weight; AZ31 magnesium wins on mass + machinability; 7075 aluminum on cost + plating.
Freeze-to-flight-ready for a fresh quadcopter revision. Autoclave cure is the long pole; CNC + PCBA run in parallel.
Drone programs are notorious for compressed schedules and last-minute mass requirements. The six phases below are how we keep one moving without dropping any of them.
Drawings, STEP, and a weight budget land in our quote portal. An ME + a layup engineer review them within 24 hours, flagging arm cross-section, ply schedule, and bonding-zone decisions before quote.
Quote out in 3 – 5 days. First frame in the autoclave within 5 days of PO; first flight-ready airframe shipped within 14 days.
Frames ship with a CMM report, a coupon ply count, and a shake-table report at the platform-mode frequencies your flight stack cares about.
Soft mould for prop, pilot run of 30 – 100 frames, rotor-balance certification on every assembly. Cpk numbers shipped before the production commit.
100 – 500 frames / wk sustained, autoclave + CNC + PCBA all inside one cell. Weekly OEE, monthly cost-walk, named cell lead.
Field returns route into engineering — broken arms, ESC failures, antenna VSWR drift. ECNs are graded, slotted into the next lot, no silent change orders.
Dedicated carbon-fiber autoclave cell with two chambers: a 1.2 m proto pot for first-frame work, a 2.4 m chamber for production. Pre-preg cold-chain handled from cut nest to cure cycle, QR-tagged ply-by-ply.
A composite of recent programs, anonymised to protect customer IP. Numbers are real ranges from the engagements they’re drawn from.
The customer was hitting 22 minutes of hover on a target of 30 + 8 (survey window + RTH reserve). The previous airframe was a heavy machined-aluminum chassis sourced from two vendors, with a bonded-carbon top plate.
We redesigned the chassis as a UD-stacked carbon monocoque with CNC aluminum inserts only at motor mounts and payload bay. Net weight savings were 184 g — most of it pulled from the chassis ribs that the previous all-aluminum design needed.
First flight on the new airframe held 42 minutes of usable hover, 14 minutes above the survey window. The customer is now flying 3 × the survey area per battery; pilot count on their crew dropped by half.
EPA and OSHA rulings since 2018 have closed dozens of US-side plating and chromate lines. Our partner plants still run them daily. The short list below shows up most on UAV drawings.
Hex-chromium anodise still required by some legacy aerospace specs on aluminum landing gear and motor mounts. Closed-loop bay; per-lot conductivity audited.
Hex-chromium conversion on motor mounts and antenna ground plates where the electrical bond to the chassis must be conductive.
Sealed Type III on aluminum landing gear, gimbal yokes, and motor faces. Black-dye option for low-IR signature; PTFE-impregnated for self-lubricating bearing seats.
Sprayed copper / nickel EMI coat on injection-moulded antenna housings and payload covers. Pairs with co-moulded grounding tabs.
High-resistance clear anodise for antenna-adjacent regions where conductive treatments would detune the radio.
Black e-coat over chassis panels and brackets. Pinhole-free 25 µm uniform; ASTM B117 1,000 hr salt-spray; ESD-safe variants for sensitive avionics adjacency.
Yes — two autoclave cells, 1.2 m and 2.4 m chamber. Pre-preg handling is full cold-chain, ply-by-ply traceability with QR-tagged cut nest. Out-of-autoclave (oven-cure) is an option when the tooling lead time pushes back.
We routinely deliver G2.5 on custom rotor + propeller assemblies when the airframe demands it. Trim-balance fixturing is built into the production cell so the balance pass is not a bolt-on extra.
We build to the hardware requirements of both — material certs, fastener torque records, ply-count traceability, rotor balance reports. We don’t self-certify; we hand off a documentation pack your DER will recognise.
Yes. Co-moulded PEEK / PC dielectric inserts in carbon frames, or machined-PTFE replacement panels for retrofits. EMI conductive coating available for adjacent grounding regions.
22 mm bore on the bearing seat, 8 mm bolt-pattern, hex motor face on a 1606 stator size. We build motor mounts for everything from micro-class racing drones to 25 kg surveying platforms.
Production from Shenzhen + Penang for commercial UAV; a US onshore cell for ITAR / DoD-adjacent programs. NDA before any CAD changes hands; site audits with 7 days notice.
Services this industry uses most
Adjacent industries we serve
Send drawings, or send a sketch with a hover-time target. Either way you’ll have an ME reviewing within 24 hours and a real quote on a real schedule shortly after.
