Mini Sparrow Glider

Making the Plans:

When making the plans or design for the Mini Sparrow Glider, we used the pdf from Flight Test for ft sparrow build and imported them into Inkscape, which would allow me to modify the plans and have them all to scale in order to fit on the 20in by 30in foam board. I began by changing the document properties to inches and the cutting space or document size as 20in by 30in because that is the size of the foam board and the laser cutter. I then downloaded the pdf into Inkscape from the Flight Test website. I realized that the tail was on another page of the pdf, and so I had to create a new document and download the tail into Inkscape. Then I copied the two pieces of the tail and pasted them into my other document containing all the other pieces of my plane. I then had all the pieces necessary to make the plane on one document. All the pieces together were too large for the 20in by 30in foam board or what the outline on Inkscape showed, therefore I had to scale all the pieces down, using percent scaling. I selected every single part of the plane, so when I put the plane together, everything would fit together, and then used the percent scaling tool on Inkscape, and it only had to be scaled down about 1%, to about 99%, so everything would fit on the outline of the foam board. I did have to move pieces around and rotate them, so even though the pieces ended up closer to each other, almost touching, they all fit on one document in the space of the foam board. Then in order to later prevent fires when I laser cut this design because the little cuts are so close together, I click around on the design to find nodes, which is a lot of tiny cuts altogether, and had to select them all and go to path and select simplify. That was the easiest way to do this, but on the fuselage when there were nodes separated that needed to be together, I had to select the first of one line and the last of the line the first line should have been connected to, and then go to path and simplify it. I had to do this on the wings, tails, and parts of the fuselage. Then, I had to use the straight line tool for wherever there was tiny split up lines right next to each other, and make one long line, and make sure the color matched whatever color the tiny lines were before because that will help later when color mapping. Then, I had to change all the colors on the design to be compatible with whether they are going to cut, cut slightly, or just raster. I changed the lines that I was going to cut to purple at setting 255 at cut .001, so it would work for the color mapping settings and they were all consistent and not black because black does not work for color mapping. I changed the lines that are going to be scored to red at .001 at 255. I changed the lines that were going to be cut through, but not necessarily all the way, to green at 255 at .001. I put the two little center of lift dots in yellow at 255 at .001 I then deleted all the extra parts of the design that were on the original design, like words, or little dots, or orange criss cross patterns, that would just make the cut even longer and possible cause a fire or mess up my design. I then made sure everything was at .001, cut setting, and then saved it to the class shared google drive folder. I then downloaded this into Correl Draw, which is the program that is used with color mapping with the laser cutter. I selected all parts of the design and set the brush stoke as hairline, and then I was able to cut my design.

Cutting the Design:

For my initial color mapping setting I put the speed for green at 40 and the power at 100, for red the speed 100 and the power 100 and for purple the speed 100 and the power 50, made sure it was set to vector not raster and then put the thickness at .22 and turned auto focus on, taped my foam board down to the laser cutter with carpenters' tape so it would not move during the cut, and then pressed print. When I cut this initial design, it did not catch on fire, but was very close to, and ended up doing the opposite of what I wanted it to. The red ended up cutting out all the way and the purple and green did not, I saved it just in case none of my modifications to the setting worked, even though it was the complete opposite of the design and would not have worked to build this plane. The second time I cut, I put in the same settings for door mapping and realized that I did not press the double arrow on color mapping which means save the settings, and I have to do that after ever change I make on the colors and that ever color setting has to be set to vector not raster, and I needed to give yellow a color map setting which ended up being 100 speed and 20 power. Another problem was that some of my red lines were set at red 245 instead of 255, which caused a problem and color mapping did not recognize it as a red, so I had to change that and make sure all of my same color lines had a consistent setting. I then Made sure the thickness was at .22 and auto focus was on. I taped down my foam board, and then pressed print on my design. The cut did not work again. The auto focus was off and so it did not cut all of the tips of my wing, also it cut out all of the red again and did not cut through the green, but the purple did work. for my final cut, the color map settings were speed 100 power 10 for yellow, speed 100 and power 30 for green, speed 100 and power 90 for red, and speed 40 and power 100 for blue. There was two other colors, but I just left those alone because they were not on my design. I made sure every color was set to vector not raster, and that I pressed the double arrow to save the settings for every color. I turned on auto focus and adjusted it with the toggle on the laser cutter, so that it could cleanly make my cut. Then, I set the thickness of my board to .22in, and pressed print. This was a successful print, even though the yellow was close to catching fire, it did not, and since the yellow was only the center of lift dots, they were not going to effect my design or plane, but if I were to print the design again, I would try to find a more successful or better setting to color map and cut yellow at for this design.

Building the Plan:

In order to build this plane we followed step by step instruction on a tutorial video, and also created our own version of the plane designs based on this tutorial's design. With that design, we were able to see which lines needed to be cut and which needed to be scored, which means the paper did not need to rip, but the styrofoam needed to be taken out of that particular part. We used Inkscape and Correl Draw in order to be able recreate the design of this tutorial with the correct scale of our foam board which was 20in by 30in, and when we created this design using color mapping we were able to tell the laser cutter what to cut all the way through and what to only slightly cut through. The workflow we used went to ft sparrow build on the Flight Test website (https://www.flitetest.com/articles/ft-sparrow-build). The original plans that we modified and scaled are right here (http://www.stonekap.net/ftplans/FT%20Mini%20Sparrow%20v1.0%20Full-Size.pdf).

Materials:

• hot glue gun/hot glue (used to glue pieces of foam together)
• foam board (which all of the pieces were outlined and cut out on)
• tape (used to keep the latch on the nose of my plane down and to modify if necessary)
• small wooden dowels (connected tip of tail to fuselage as well as a place to hold one side of the rubber bands)
• rubber bands (used to keep the with on the fuselage and connected to the whole plane and keep it centered and in place)
• small screw driver (used to remove styrofoam when scoring the foam board)
• marker (used to make creases larger or angled on parts of the plane, like the wing, as well as to write your name on the plane)
• laser cutter (used to cut out the pieces of the plane)
• clay (to add weight to the front of the plane)

Changes to Workflow: The only part of workflow we changed was the creating process, so I didn't have to cut anything out with razors, or use razors to score or use razors at all, the pieces were created just as they were going to be used using the laser cutter. We also added clay in the nose of the plane in order to balance out the center of lift and gravity of our plane. The video did not add clay to their plane. Overall my plane was very similar to the plane in the tutorial and was built very similar as well.

Building the Plane Images:

Fuselage:

Fuselage with end fin:

Fuselage with tail:

Wings:

Rubber Bands on wing:

Final Plane:

Flying the Plan and Modifying it Due to Challenges:

Flights and Modifications During Flights Due to Challenges:

Times:

1st Flight: 3.4 seconds

2nd Flight: 8.6 seconds

3rd Flight: 3.3 seconds

During my first flight, my plane went straight down, then stalled a little and then went straight down again. I knew I needed to improve my design in order to have it stay in the air a little longer. First I made sure the elevator was slightly tilted up, so that my plane would go up in the air and stay in the air rather than going straight down. I also added more clay to the nose of my plane, in order for the center of lift and gravity to be equal because based off of my first flight, my plane was tail heavy so it went do faster, and I want my plan to glide in the air for a while, and in order to achieve that the center of lift has to be equal. I checked the center of lift by putting my fingers on the two dots on the bottom side of my wing, which were created by design to help me with this issue. When my plane balanced, I taped my latch shut with tape, so that it would not produce drag or cause any other problems to slow down my plane. I also made sure that my clay was all at the front of the nose of my plane, so it would not move around and shift the center of lift or make it unbalanced. When I took my second flight the modifications helped a lot to improve the time in which my plane stayed in the air. My plane did not fly straight though, and in order to improve this for my third and final flight, I had to figure out a way for the plane to fly straight. I straightened out my wing and made sure it was centered and so maybe my plane would fly straight this time. When I took my final flight, my plane went right very fast and fell to the ground. If I had some more flights, I think I would modify my plane by adjusting wing somehow to lean slightly left, so maybe it would go straight or also turning the tail or somehow adjusting the tail to make my plane go more straight. Wind might have also effected my flights, but I think I could have found a better way to turn my plane straight to have a more successful flight.

Conclusion:

During this project, I was able to learn how to use color mapping on the laser cutter and some of the potential problems to look for when using it. I also am beginning to understand differences in models of plans and how they fly and what is necessary to fix them. From my last project to this project, I now understand the importance of having to scale all of my pieces to be able to fit together in order to fly correctly, rather than just changing all the pieces differently because that can effect the way your plane flies or if it will be able to fly or get put together. I now have a better understanding of what causes particular problems, and ways to fix them in planes, but I know I still have a lot to learn in this area and lot to improve on as the semester continues, but after completing not one but two projects, it helps me understand where certain issues like stalling or going straight down or not going straight, can be fixed, and these issues can be fixed in similar ways from model to model but each model. Also I have realized that even though we built two different models, a lot of the information we have learned about one model can be applied and maybe modified slightly to the other models. I am excited to keep learning about new models of planes and new concepts of aviation throughout the rest of this semester.