Cereal box planes.

[Beech/run24]

What are some tips/suggestions for building r.c. models with cereal box cardboard in place of foamboard?
I prefer to keep reusable materials, such as newspapers and cereal boxes. Thought they could be useful for the hobby.

 

[NC_Fly_Boy]

There is at least 1 video on FT in which they use pizza boxes.

I think that you would be limited to very lightweight planes with the cereal boxes. Foamboard and corrugated cardboard get their strength from two plates sandwiching a core. This is essentially a stressed skin layout.

I have used lighter gauge cardboard for fins but not for load bearing structures.

Good luck. Keep us posted!

 

[Timmy P]

Might find a glimpse of one in the first or second Flite Fest video. Cant remember what year it was. But I think it was the first.. Its been done. May be limited to a 35 inch wingspan or so, unless you use a wood or metal wing spar.

 

[mayan]

The people at Flite Test built a Wing from the remains of a pizza box.

I built one myself a few weeks back however I never tried to make it fly.

Since then I built another model out of cardboard boxes.

This model was built as a chuck glider and didn’t fly all that well.

I do want to list for you a few issues I found when tried building from cardboard of any sort.
1) It thickness differs from 5mm foam board something that you need to keep in mind when taking a FT plane plan.
2) I found that it’s hard to create A and B folds on the cardboard simply because you can’t cut it cavities.
3) Hot glue will heat up the cardboard so watch your fingers. Wouldn’t want you to get burned, like I did.

I am all about using things that can be recycled into something else but cardboard didn’t work for me. If you get it to work well I’d love to know how you did it, espically if you manage to do it without hot glue so that it can be given to a kid as a project. Regardless if you are about recycling I can suggest you go to a mall near your house and see if the stores there have promotions that can been printed or attached to foam boards, and see if you can take that. Here in Israel a lot of stores use foam board as a based to print or glue their promotions on as it’s durable. Most of the time when the promotions are over they just throw them away.

Best of luck.