Rubber Band Powered FT Plane?

[FMGough]

So recently I have been building a lot of chuck gliders with my two boys to fly around in our backyard. Thanks Nerd Nic for your awesome plans. And I began thinking, what if we could take an FT design and fly it using rubber bands? So I selected the FT Simple Cub as my airframe to experiment with this idea. I printed pages 4, 5, and 6 of the AIO plans without scaling them. Just print them as is to use as a template.

For this build I used the: spar, firewall (doubled), fuselage, wings, horizontal and vertical stabilizers. I did not use the the fuselage doublers or bottom as I wanted to be able to access the elastic band and keep weight down. I cut the required pieces and followed the cut, crease, and fold lines per the plans just as you would with a full size build. I used short lengths of bamboo skewer for the wings tie downs and at the tail end of the elastic band. I purchased elastic, propellers, bearings, and prop shafts from Guillows.

Overall the mini elastic band powered Cub is pretty good. It flies decent once balanced. I do not have an elastic winder, so I did not get many rotations out of the elastic band with just hand winding the propeller. But for a first attempt it turned out well enough to fly with a decent throw. I think my Version 2 will not have as thick a spar and with the purchase of a winder I could get more rotations and longer flights.

 

[Gazoo]

Wow. You gots lots of rubber bands.

Looks a bit on the heavy side. How much does it weigh?

 

[ScottPT]

Nice workbench, by the way. Where did you get yours? One year ago, when we decided to make a full renovation of our old house, first of all what we had to purchase is portable workbenches (like these top-notch things: https://cozyhousetoday.com/best-portable-workbench-reviews/), and of course a lot of materials, like wood, bricks and concrete. A little bit of fresh soil for our backyard, and after 3 months - we've made it.