I took a walk to the park to test out the Sparrow Catapult Glider (designed and built by Lloyd Shales).
These things are awesome! If you want one get in touch with me! The better flights are towards the end of the video.
I flew my old Squirrel too. This one is several years old as you can see by the numerous tissue repairs. 🙂
We also had the Chinese prefab catapult glider. We got it to fly by adding lots of reflex by bending the body quite a bit. Didn’t fly very well compared to the real genuine balsa flyer. I think a parachute would be simpler and work better.
This is several years old. Still flies great. Has original elastic band too! Trick is to not over wind it.
This was designed and built by Lloyd Shales. Notice the repair. I did that. I needed to remove a tiny bit of the nose ballast after that repair.
I had the pleasure of an interview with Giacomo Panico on CBC Radio. We talked about some of my volunteer work, donations of models and general sharing of models. Also the motivation and progress of the project.
I got it at Walmart for something like 10 bucks (end of summer sale).
It flew poorly. We could not get it to pitch up. It comes all ready to fly. I can see that they designed some wing reflex into it but perhaps because of flat packaging it wasn’t enough. I bent some more into it. It helped a bit but it still couldn’t raise the nose.
The construction methods are interesting. Very robust with the use of a fabric like wing surface and injection molded parts. Too heavy for rubber-power at this scale but just right for a toy catapult glider. Also the hinged folding wing worked fairly well.
There is a traditional type of folding wing glider concept by Jim Walker. I added the patent pictures below. They have a DIY/kit over at make that I’d like to try. Bill Kuhl also has done some recent experiments.
I feel that there is a lot of complexity in the traditional design. So when I took a stab at catapult gliders not too long ago. I decided to not do a complex folding wing but instead try a spinning maple seed type descent. As it turns out, a spinning maple seed doesn’t work as well when you scale it up. They work but they don’t have the beauty since the efficiency seems to drop off. This is an awesome marvel of nature.
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