Trashplane

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-fY-eGZsdQ]

[Flyboy258] shows us that hobby R/C airplanes can be built from trash relatively easily. A bit of old tarp and a simple frame work as the body.  The rudder is made from old foam packaging.  It seems to fly pretty well considering the lack of official design, or aerodynamic features.

[via Makezine]

33 thoughts on “Trashplane

  1. Brilliant, stabilizing it like a kite and at the same time it becomes a shooting star. Hope it won the contest. It is a contest for building a rc plane from trash, except for the radio part. (I think the engines, propellers and batteries of the contestees are not from trash either.)

  2. “with enough horsepower you can make a brick fly” – or at least, with control surfaces that work and a positive static margin (centre of gravity is ahead of the centre of lift) you can make a flat plate fly. flat surfaces are ok at lift generation in fact, you just get quite a bit of drag too, but that’s no problem these days with big power available from small/light motor packages.

  3. I love the dog barking in the background during the entire song… Coldplay should consider adding that to their live performances; it could make their newer music much more enjoyable…

    Also, the plane was freakin’ cool. This is recycling in its truest form.

  4. The first few flights had me worried there, but when he got the larger rudder and streamers…wow, looks great. He could probably sell that as a kit.

    Reminded me of the time my one plane crashed so hard I had to rebuild the front half with the metal from a few Mountain Dew cans.

  5. pillbox and cooperised

    This is why I have some issues with most RC, and being a flight instructor, have little interest. Same really with the newer more powerful acrobatic planes…. it is all pure power with some control surfaces…. brute force over elegance (although the streamers were a beautiful example of the latter).

    Also… that was not a rudder, but only a vertical stabilizer. The rudder is the moving control surface. Interesting concept of Ailerators….

  6. Cool. Reminds me of when I was a kid and made an RC plane out of one of those styrofoam gliders. I only had a 3 channel surface radio and a nitro car engine but it worked pretty well :)

  7. @blizzarddemon:

    “Nah, this thing is so American it hurts.”

    No kidding – 50 of these things should be flying at a Blue Angels show.

    The whole “make something from garbage” initiative is always interesting — maybe I should let the trash start piling up next to the parts bin…

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