Monday 16 May 2022

Things You Never Thought You'd Make - Flags!

 


I'm really lucky these days that I get to make lots of projects and even luckier that I've hustled and grafted to get myself in a position where I often get paid to do so. Occasionally I catch myself pondering and giggling about something I could never have imagined I'd end up making. Often these are small side projects that somehow relate or help another project along the way.  

A recent example is I've ended up making a flag and a slot together flagpole! "Why" I hear you cry. Well, I've been continuing to develop and test fly the EXOS swing wing rocket glider and I've been using a local site as a launch area. It's a swampy moorland known locally to our ragtag bunch of RC/Freeflight plane and rocket group as "The Swamp" and it's perfect, but quite featureless. I discovered the first time I set up a rocket launch rail there that as soon as you walk more than 10 meters from your launch spot, well, it disappears! A flag was needed, so I created a pole using 2 x 1m lengths of aluminium tubing and glued a 4mm brass tube into one end which means they can then slip into each other. The flag is simply a bit of rip stop nylon left over from a parachute project which I've sewn a small sleeve into which slides over the flagpole. Finished off with a heat transfer vinyl concretedog logo it's working well to get me back to my launch equipment after a long walk to recover a rocket!