A little glider: My first balsa build!

Pieliker96

Elite member
It all started with a cool little rubber-band powered Guillows model of a Hellcat that my brother got me for Christmas. Then, my other brother gave me a heap of balsa that he used to build his pinewood derby car. I realized that I had some spare electronics lying around, one thing led to another, and BAM! My first balsa plane!

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The wing ribs (clark-Y) were laser cut from 1/16" sheeting. The wingspan is 33" with a chord of 6", and the AUW is 100g currently (projected to be 110, I need to add a nose). This puts the wing loading at ~2.8oz/ft^2 of wing area, which should make for nice slow flight. I didn't have any proper covering film, so what you see here is packaging tape. There's more than a couple of wrinkles, and the tape had some weird splotches in it.

Beautiful? No. Functional? Yes.

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The two servos are positioned under the back of the wing, with the pushrods running along the tail boom. They fit nice and snugly together.

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The battery is a 4-cell Nimh that I took out of my Losi micro-T after I upgraded it to a Lipo. It plugs directly into the reciever, meaning I don't have to use a BEC. This saves weight and tidies up the wiring considerably.

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I may consider adding a motor, esc, and larger battery in the future, but I like the simplicity of the current setup. Tomorrow I'll build a nose that will hold the battery and RX a little forwards of where they are now to allow for proper CG, and then we can see how it glides!
 
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Joker 53150

Mmmmmmm, balsa.
Mentor
Welcome to the world of balsa! Using tape for covering probably added weight compared to traditional covering, but there is no shrinking to deal with. If you do it again you may want to add some thin balsa sticks across the wing to help keep it from twisting and to support the covering. Having access to a laser cutter must be fantastic!
 

Pieliker96

Elite member
I wasn't too concerned about wing torsion at this scale, but there is a significant amount of it. Next time, especially if I end up using ailerons, I'll probaby reinforce them more.

I made a little nose out of balsa that friction fits over the box fuse. I ended up having to tape a quarter to it to get the CG proper, which put me at 125g all-up weight.

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It flew well, but not for long. It's sort of difficult to find thermals in the winter ;)

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I think I need to wait for better conditions or go indoors to properly fly this thing, although it is nice knowing that it can take a beating - there were many nose-ins during testing :black_eyed:
 

rockyboy

Skill Collector
Mentor
Congrats! Love seeing new folks get into "crunchies" :black_eyed: and with your own design too! I'm working up to designing my own balsa plane, but I'm being pretty methodical (i.e. slow) about it.