Balsa Plane: Revenge of Cake

During the past couple of weeks in engineering class, Chase Fischer and I have been working together to complete a balsa wood airplane from a kit. We worked diligently and were the second to complete our plane second in our class. Unfortunatly the wings broke off during our very first test. We fixed the plane the very next day and during our class competition preformed slightly above average. A problem that we experienced was that our plane would keep turning to the left. To compensate for this we placed sticky notes on the right wing and the tail. We then had consistent results until our plane finally fell apart. In the future I would consider using a stronger glue and would take more care when gluing the two halves of the wings together.

Here are responses to questions from our class blog(posted on 3/1/12):
1) For a couple of weeks in Engineering, we worked on a project where we built Balsa wood airplanes. Chase and I succsesfully completed our planes in two weeks. The plane ended up being relatively succesful when plying except for a tendancy to fly to the left.
4) The first time we tested our plane it flew straight down and the wings broke off. After that we had to reglue them and did not have a chance to retest until the competition.
5) Describe how well your aircraft flew in our competition. Did you win any events (furthest distance, longest time aloft)? Were you competative in our best decorated flier competition?
Our plane did not win but it waws very close in longest time aloft behind Sammy.

6) Pick three steps from the PLTW 12 step design process and describe how your team worked through these during the course of this experience.
Create and make- We made the plane based on the plan given to us. We created it second in the class.
Refine-When our wings broke off we rebuilt them with the wood glue as opposed to elmers. We also made sure they were glued evenly so they didnt tilt to one side more than another.
Reflect- Chase and I decided that to more effectively build our plane we have to glue the parts to go together balanced. Hopefully this will cause the plane to fly straight as opossed to turn sideways.


Below are pictures of or plane, Revenge of Cake:

Here is Chase and I Papering the wing of our plane.

Here is the almost finished version of the plane.

Here is Revenge of Cake: side view.

There is a front profile.