Thread: The Make Something Every Week Contest
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Old 10-02-2010, 11:51 AM
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ceptimus ceptimus is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: UK
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Default Re: The Make Something Every Week Contest
I was in chat when liv posted the OP and I told the guys there that I'd made a small chuck glider out of a pizza tray earlier that day. liv said that it qualified, so here are the details.

I wanted to make a small battery powered radio controlled delta plane, but I had no idea where the centre of gravity (balance point) should be. The position where a plane balances is very important - if it's wrong the plane will crash, so I decided to make a small chuck glider to experiment with.



I happened to have a clean pizza tray to hand, so I used that as building material. I drew some shapes on the tray (you can see from the lines that I changed my mind quite a bit), then I cut them out and glued them together with some UHU Por glue (I tried some other glues but the material just melted).



I taped what I thought was a UK penny to the plane so I could move the balance point around. I grabbed the penny from a pile of old coins that's been standing next to my PC for ages.



But when I looked more closely, it turned out to be a USA cent.


After moving the coin around and bending up the 'flaps' at the back of the wing (technically these are called 'elevons'), I got it to fly pretty well - though it's difficult to film it and chuck it at the same time - that video was shot in my garden this morning. :blush:



I've since begun on making the radio controlled and powered version (but it's not finished, so that one isn't my entry for the 'Make Something' contest). The chuckie glider worked well, so I'm sticking to the same pizza tray material, but I've strengthened it up a bit by adding some carbon fibre strip in between the back edge of the wing and the elevons.



In the view on the bottom of the plane, the blue things at the back (servos) are to move the elevons to steer the plane; the motor is a modified motor from a CD-ROM drive. You can see the speed controller (not wired up yet) that sends power to the motor and the radio receiver is at the back, in front of the servos. The battery will be taped on top of the wing, under the fin - it's made from three mobile phone batteries wired together in series.
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