Making Things Fly – 3D Printed Supports for Paper Airfoils

I wanted to mention one cool project that I have been working on over the last week in conjunction with the Riverfront/Looking Glass High School here in the Eugene area.  It is an engineering project on how to make things fly.  I was asked by their science teacher, Amber Anderson, if I could help with 3D printing parts to make planes. This was a sure bet for fun collaboration.  Amber was excited to hear that we could bring a 3D printer over for show.  However, we not only brought the printer but we also got the students working on using the advanced properties of Tinkercad, a purely online CAD software program, that we could use to create airfoil ribs.  And, given a set of 8 of these ribs, we could fold over and glue on a standard piece of printer/copy paper to form an airfoil.  I suggested modeling one after a  Clark-Y airfoil that is good for smaller aircraft.  With a couple of post-it notes, a wooden dowel and a couple of crayons for centering weight, we had an aircraft that could glide down the hallway.  In all, the students got to learn Tinkercad, design their own airfoils to test, and also learn what makes a plane fly.  I will post some designs here in the next couple of days.

Paper Gliders with 3D printer airfoil struts!