cardboard

77 Articles

The Cardboard Airplane Saga Continues

November 9, 2025 by 24 Comments

History is full of engineers making (or attempting to make) things out of the wrong stuff, from massive wooden aircraft to boats made of ice and sawdust. [PeterSripol] is attempting to make an ultralight aircraft out of a rather wrong material: cardboard. In the previous installment of the project, a pair of wings was fabricated. In this installment, the wings find their home on an equally mostly cardboard fuselage, complete with rudder and elevator. 

The fuselage construction amounts to little more than a cardboard box in the shape of an RC airplane. Doublers provide additional strength in critical areas, and fillets provide a modicum of additional strength around seams. To support the weight of the pilot, a piece of corrugated cardboard is corrugated again, with an additional piece making up the floor. With the addition of a couple of side windows for comfort and visibility, the fuselage is completed, but additional components need to be added.

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Making A Cardboard Airplane Wing

October 24, 2025 by 20 Comments

Ideally, an aircraft would be made of something reasonably strong, light, and weather resistant. Cardboard, is none of those things. But that did not stop [PeterSripol] from building an ultralight wing out of cardboard.

Firstly, he wanted to figure out the strongest orientation of the cardboard flutes for the wing spars. He decided on a mix of horizontal and vertical flutes for the wing spar, with the horizontal flutes resisting vertical deformations and the vertical flutes resisting chord wise deformations.

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Making Corrugated Cardboard Stronger And Waterproof

June 15, 2025 by 45 Comments

As useful as corrugated cardboard is, we generally don’t consider it to be a very sturdy material. The moment it’s exposed to moisture, it begins to fall apart, and it’s easily damaged even when kept dry. That said, there are ways to make corrugated cardboard a lot more durable, as demonstrated by the [NightHawkInLight]. Gluing multiple panels together so that the corrugation alternates by 90 degrees every other panel makes them more sturdy, with wheat paste (1:5 mixture of flour and water) recommended as adhesive.

Other tricks are folding over edges help to protect against damage, and integrating wood supports. Normal woodworking tools like saws can cut these glued-together panels. Adding the wheat paste to external surfaces can also protect against damage. By applying kindergarten papier-mâché skills, a custom outside layer can be made that can be sanded and painted for making furniture, etc.

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A painted RC plane made of cardboard. It has an orange propeller and camo-esque markings along with concentric blue, white, and red circles near the wingtips.

Cardboard R/C Plane Actually Flies

August 1, 2024 by 19 Comments

Many makers start by building mock-ups from cardboard, but [Alex-08] has managed to build an R/C plane that actually flies, out of cardboard.

If you’ve been thinking of building an R/C plane from scratch yourself, this guide is an excellent place to start. [Alex-08] goes through excruciating detail on how he designed and constructed this marvel. The section on building the wings is particularly detailed since that’s the most crucial element in making sure this plane can get airborne.

Some off-the-shelf R/C parts and 3D printed components round out the parts list to complement the large cardboard box used for most of the structural components. The build instructions even go through some tips on getting that vintage aircraft feel and how to adjust everything for a smooth flight.

Need a wind tunnel instead? You can build that out of cardboard too. If paper airplanes are more your thing, how about launching them from space? And if you’re just trying to get a head start on Halloween, why not laser cut an airplane costume from cardboard?

Swapping Vinyl For Cardboard With This ESP32 Turntable

June 30, 2024 by 15 Comments

Cardboard is a surprisingly durable material, especially in its corrugated form. It’s extremely lightweight for its strength, is easy to work, can be folded and formed into almost any shape, is incredibly inexpensive, and when it has done its duty it can be recycled back into more paper. For these reasons, it’s often used in packaging material but it can be used to build all kinds of things outside of ensuring that products arrive at their locations safely. This working cardboard record player is one example.

While the turntable doesn’t have working records in the sense that the music is etched into them like vinyl, each has its own RFID chip embedded that allows the ESP32 in the turntable’s body to identify them. Each record corresponds to a song stored on an SD card that instructs the ESP32 to play the appropriate song. It also takes care of spinning the record itself with a small stepper motor. There are a few other details on this build that tie it together too, including a movable needle arm held on with a magnet and a volume slider.

As far as a building material goes, cardboard is fairly underrated in our opinion. Besides small projects like this turntable, we’ve also seen it work as the foundation for a computer, and it even has the strength and durability to be built into a wall or even used as shelving material. And, of course, it’s a great material to use when prototyping new designs.

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The end result of the build, a supersized ultrasonic sensor, held in a person's hands

A Super-Size Functional Tribute To An Ultrasonic Sensor

June 1, 2024 by 6 Comments

Sometimes, it’s time to shut down the oscilloscope, and break out the cardboard and paints. If you’re wondering what for, well, here’s a reminder of an Instructable from [CrazyScience], that brings us back to cardboard crafts days. They rebuild one of the most iconic components for an electronics tinkering beginner — an ultrasonic distance sensor, and what’s fun is, it stays fully functional after the rebuild!

This project is as straightforward as it gets, describing all the steps in great detail, and you can complete it with just a hot glue gun and soldering iron. With materials being simple cardboard, aluminum foil, popsicle sticks, some mesh, and a single ultrasonic sensor for harvesting the transmitter and receiver out of, this is the kind of project you could easily complete with your kids on a rainy day.

Now, the venerable ultrasonic sensor joins the gallery of classics given a size change treatment, like the 555 timer we’ve seen two different takes on, or perhaps that one Arduino Uno. Unlike these three, this project’s cardboard skeleton means it’s all that simpler to build your own, what’s with all the shipping boxes we accumulate.

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DIY Shredder Creates Insulation

October 23, 2023 by 28 Comments

Plenty of us have experience with paper shredders, but there are all kinds of machines designed to completely destroy other materials as well, from metal and plastic, to entire cars. [Action BOX] built their own heavy-duty shredder capable of dismantling things like cell phones and other robust handheld objects, but after seeing what it would physically shred they decided to give it an actual job creating insulation for the attic space in their garage.

The shredder itself uses opposing metal plates arranged on sets of two cylinders, with each cylinder powered by it’s own large motor. In total, the entire system uses around 1.5 kW, so to make their green insulation project as green as possible they decided to power it with an equivalent amount of solar panels. For the insulation they’re using a year’s worth of boxes from various deliveries, and after a time-consuming process preparing the boxes for the shredder, shredding the strips of cardboard, and packaging it in garbage bags their efforts netted them enough to partially fill the space between four ceiling joists. Continue reading “DIY Shredder Creates Insulation” →