Rubber Band Helicopter- Engineering Principles- Cy Koppang

I’m a high school student tasked with building a helicopter that flies and is made in class. You don’t need much skill to build one of these, as long as you can use tape you should be able to build one. I did not make this design and only changed some things.

You will need two pieces of balsa wood, three rubber bands(or more), one paper clip, and one propeller from a balsa wood airplane. 

 At first, I was planning on building a dual rotor helicopter, however, that proved to be more difficult than I thought so I decided to use a single rotor instead. I used balsa wood for the body of my helicopter since it is light, I also used the balsa wood airplane propeller as my main rotor, the tape was used to hold it all together and paper clips to wind up the rubber band. The rubber bands were used to spin the rotor.

Before I decided to switch to a single rotor my plan was to build two identical helicopters and combine them to make a single dual rotor helicopter. This idea didn't work well and after some testing, I decided to use only one-half of my original design. To start I took two pieces of balsa wood and placed them over each other sort of like a cross. I then taped them together.

Next, I added the paper clip and rotor. To do this first you want to bend your paper clip so that one end is sticking out. Then slide it onto the balsa wood, on the opposite end of the piece of wood add your propeller.

For the final step, you simply take your rubber bands and loop them around the paper clip and the hook on the balsa wood propeller.

My original design of having two propellers was plagued with problems, so switching to the single propeller was an easy choice, however, I had to make some modifications and changes to the design to work. I added more rubber bands, and instead of construction paper, I used balsa wood for stabilization. Although these changes didn't really change how the helicopter looked they did change how it flew. The more rubbers bands made the propeller spin faster which meant it flew faster but it couldn't spin for very long, I found that three was a pretty good amount. My stabilizer didn't work very well at all and if I had time for another redesign I would have probably done construction paper.