Free Flight and tinkering with vinyl cutters and lasers!

 

I've been getting interested in free flight aeroplanes and plane design in general. I really am a newbie though and as such I've been building some simple kits to gather some experience. The BMFA sell a range of educational kits and one of them is recommended as a good starting point for building with balsa. The Gymminie cricket is a simple rubber powered free flight model that is aimed at indoor flying in a sports hall or outdoor flying on an incredibly still day. It's a very affordable kit at £3.50 and gives some decent experience of building lightweight airframes with balsa and tissue. It's a good lesson in delicate working but the stuff/skills that you learn on this applies to any classic balsa and tissue build. 

My interest in the Gymminie cricket design overlapped with me getting hold of a secondhand vinyl cutter, a silhouette cameo mk1. This machine has been great and warrants a post all of it's own at some point, but as a quick overview I have it set up and running being driven from Inkscape with a great opensource plugin extension.  Whilst I've predominantly used the vinyl cutter to cut vinyl stickers (see the next plane in the post) I spent some time dialling in an approach to be able to cut tissue paper. Its definitely possible but is a tricky balance of cutting feeds and speeds, backing board tackiness and general operator competence and patience! The two Gymminie cricket builds have been a great test bed for lots of tissue experiments.

I wanted to jump into trying to design and scratch building my own planes. Starting simple I've been tinkering with an all balsa chuck glider design which I've named "Intuit" because, you guessed it, it's been mainly built on intuition rather than any decent engineering knowledge! Whilst I could have hand cut the balsa with a craft blade I've been cutting balsa successfully on a CNC laser diode engraver rig which I can't talk too much about as it's destined for review in Hackspace magazine. However I can go as far as saying it's nice to be able to cut balsa accurately and this chuck glider is starting to perform well with the various adjustments to trim and embellishments it has. I've certainly learn't loads and it's good to apply bits of reading around general plane principles and aerodynamics to actual things that attempt to fly. On the horizon is more chuck glider designs, I'd like to try a rocket boosted swing glider ( a rocket that deploys glider wings and glides for recovery) and I'm quite interested in using small motors and supercapacitors for electric free flight experiments. More post will follow!