Welcome! Thanks for having a look at my entry intoWeblogPoMo2024! If you want a little over view of what’s going on check out my post WeblogPomo 2024!!! 📝. I will spending my month talking about hand-thrown gliders and my journey so far. Let’s dig in.
I have always had a passing interest in remote controlled vehicles, however, like every other mid-thirty-year-old, a once-passing-interest has now become a passion of mine (as of a fortnight ago).
There are two people who can be directly thanked for my current passion: Daniel Riley from rctestflight for putting out fun videos and keeping ideas burning away in the back of my mind and my eldest daughter.
A few weeks ago my daughter came home from a STEM event and had a helicopter blade attached to a rubber band and a stick. The purpose was to wind up the propeller, coiling the rubber band, and then release it and let it fly into the air. Well, my dear darling added some paper to make some wings, and the thing worked great! She had a wind up plane that she had designed herself.
I asked her after a few days if I could have a try and design some wings. She said yes and I made something so much worse. While she didn’t mind my failure it did set me off down the path of tinkering and researching and building.
Since then I have made quite a few gliders from just about anything I could find laying around. I really think I have learned a lot and I am looking forward to what I can achieve yet!
I am one of those people who find it helpful to have an end goal to keep myself motivated. The end goal for me is something called a Discus Launch Glider (DLG). The DLG is a remote controlled glider that is launched into the air by yeeting it as hard as one can. FliteTest does a much better job explaining it then me.
Not gonna lie, I kinda forgot about the post for today so I am cramming it in before bed! But they’ll get better, I promise! Have a picture of some of the stuff I have built so far!🍀
The above photo shows four hand made gliders from a mixture of paddle pops, cardboard, plastic and hot glue. The gliders range from roughly the size of a banana to one with a wing span of at least seven bananas.
(Sorry for the weird photo alt text, not sure how to do it properly in this software.)