Simple Wooden Airplane for Beginners

In this Project I am going to show you how to build a simple airplane out of wood using some basic tools.

The Materials Needed for this Project:

1. A block of wood the size of your airplane

2. Thin sheets of wood to make the wings and other parts out of

3. Wood glue to glue all the components together (preferably one that dries see through as this makes your build look better

4. Sanding paper and preferebly a sanding block to sand down your components

5. A drill with a small drill bit

6. A saw preferably a wood saw (not the one in the image)

7. A fretsaw, preferably an electric one

In this first step you are going to want to design and draw out your airplane on a piece of paper either to scale as shown in the image above or not, make sure that you have the right size of wood for the plane you are planning.

Make sure to include any measurements needed and have your plans be as precise as possible so that you can refer to them later on.

Your plan should look somewhat like the one I have included which is the one that I used, feel free to copy the measurements that I used and my plans.

In the second step you are first going to transcribe your wings and tail section onto your thin piece of wood using a pencil and a ruler making sure to save as much wood and cutting as possible by putting them next to each other. Also pay attention to the accuracy of your drawings.

Then use a drill to drill small holes where you believe turning the saw at an angle is necessary. This is only needed for steeper angles as a fretsaw can not handle tight turns and the blade might break.

After marking and drilling holes you cut out the seperate pieces using your fret saw, while doing this take it slow to make sure you get a straight cut and your pieces look good, which is something I messed up on one of my wings resulting in a slight wave.

The second part to this step is that you sand the pieces that you have cut out, this is both for the smoothness of the pieces and to make sure that they are nice and rounded and don't have any jagged edges which would make the plane look bad.

For the main body of the airplane first cut out a retangular piece of wood matching the size of the body of your airplane minus the diagonal as seen on the plans.

Take your time on this cut as any mistakes could result in a slight diasgonal or rough cut which while it can be often sanded away can also result in an uneven cut.

You don't have to sand this piece yet as you're going to do another additional cut

Next you are going to first mark and then sand a diagonal into the block of wood you cut out in the previous step, again it's important to make sure that you are very careful with this cut as if you mess up the diagonal your plane might not look right so just take your time and make sure to get everything correct.

Now you are going to want to sand the entire block of wood and smoothen it out, if there are some uneven sections to the cuts you made then you can also fix or somewhat repair them by sanding them out depending on the severity of the mistake.

In this step you will cut out the canopy of the airplane, to do this mark out a small section of wood as seen on the plans and cut this out, the cut does not have to be very precise as you're going to be doing a lot of filing and sanding to get the actual shape of the canopy correct.

The next and the last step that actually requires the manipulating of the wood is filing and sanding it, this is so that it gets the shape of a canopy, this means that you will want to make your canopy smoothly curve downwards on one side and stay straight on the other side with the curve facing forward as can be seen on the plans.

After shaping itmake sure to sand it down just to make it smooth and look good on all sides

The next step is to start glueing parts on the body of the airplane, however, this can not be done haphazardly as you are going to need a way to support the plane while it dries to make sure the pieces, especially the wings, don't fall off during the drying process. To do this I started with the top of the airplane where I glued down the canopy and the vertical stabilizer as carefully as possible.

While doing this make sure to apply enough glue to form a layer between the two pieces and whipe off most but not all of the excess as that also gives the joint some of its strength.

In this second to last step you will be attaching the wing and elevator on one side, to do this again use glue and make sure to apply enough glue. To make sure the wing and the elevator don't fall off or shift while drying simply rest the plane on one side.

While applying the glue you are going to want to pay attention to the same things as in the previous steps and also remove some of the excess.

This last step may be a little bit tricky as you are going to have to glue on one wing on one side and find some way to make sure that the plane still sits on it's side to make sure the wing and elevator stay in place, this can result in some precarious situations but should be possible as seen in the above images.