Bird Wing Glider

This project began because I was fascinated by the different kinds of bird wings. I wanted to create a glider inspired by bird wings and research about them in the process. I found that there are 4 different distinct types of bird wings and they are all specialized for different things. I ultimately chose to model the glider after passive soaring wings as those were best suited to my purposes. Passive soaring wings were made to glide with little effort and catch hot air currents rising from the ground. I had to create several prototypes and my final project seems to fly pretty well.

-laptop

-tinkercad account

-wooden skewers

-hot glue

-tissue paper

-pencil

-scissors

-blank printer paper

The first thing you want to do is decide what specific bird wing you want your model to look like. As previously mentioned I picked passive soaring wings and then sketch out the structure of the wing. I specifically made my sketch based on the bones in a birds wing.

This is where you want the tinker cad account because now you log into tinker cad and model the skeleton of your wings. You want to use really long and thin cylinders to vaguely map out where your structure supports will be.

Once you have a scaled sketch and a model, you want to take your skewers and measure out how long you need each skewer to be. You may notice that you need more skewers to support the wing at this stage.

Finally you warm up your hot glue gun and begin assembling all of the pieces according to your drawing and model. I recommend assembling both wings separately and then attaching them together later. I hot glued one side first and then flipped it over and hot glued from the other side for optimal durability.

Now that you have successfully assembled your variety of skewers the fun can begin. In order to attach to tissue paper which will become the wing fiber to your glider you will first have to quickly put hot glue onto all the parts of the skeleton where you want the wings to attach and then quickly while the glue is still hot lay a taught layer of tissue paper over the entire skeleton.

Now you should have 2 wing skeletons attached to a piece of tissue paper. Here is where your glider begins to take shape. You want to cut the shape of your wings out of the tissue paper so that you should end up with 2 wings. I sketched the shape I wanted onto the underside of the tissue paper before cutting but you can eyeball it too.

This is where you can go a bit freeform. I used the same technique that I used on the wings to create mock tailfeathers and attached them to the body but I actually had several drafts where I attached the body differently but I found success in a large tail and relatively light body. The tail worked well to balance the larger wings.