Balsa wood glider

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” – William Arthur Ward 

A quote that came across my mind after meeting Dr Noorfazreena. Pro tip if anyone reading this is enrolled in an aerospace engineering course please make good ties with her. 

Dr Faz and Kishorr

This was a class group project nonetheless, we learned a lot participating in this six-week-long project. I will be explaining the progress by week:

Week 1:

We had our discussion as a team and divided tasks. We also came up with the early designs of our glider. We had inspiration from various planes. We finally came up with our very own glider design. We came up with the hand sketches and gave it to Dr Faz for approval.

Team mates working on the design

Week 2:

Upon approval, we started to draw the design using Catia V5 (CAD software). We did the necessary calculations. A few adjustment was made to satisfy the requirements for the glider to function efficiently. 

Week 3:

Then came the tedious part, where we laser cut the balsa wood according to our dimensions. This whole process was assisted by Mr Amir. The whole week was only involving preparing the rough parts for the glider i.e the fuselage and wings.

Me sanding the balsa wood

Week 4:

This week was full of refining process like skinning and sanding the wood. The interesting part was when we had to cover the bare frame of the wings with balsa wood. The problem was a thin wood by itself was too fragile, we overcame it by soaking the wood in water for 30 mins and then slowly bending it to achieve the curvature of the wings. We also removed any rough edges by using the hand held grinder.

Leveling the wings of glider

Anon ironing the paper on glider

Week 5:

The primary objective of this week was to 'beautify' the glider. All the groups applied different colors for their gliders. We used coloured papers and ironed them to the body of the glider. Some of them had red stripes while other were pink in colour. 

Week 6:

Approaching our deadline, all of us begin to add final touch to our glider. We began testing our gliders and did minor tweaking to ensure our glider performed the best.

On the day of the event, all the team gave their best performance. We had a lot of crashes but we had even more fun. The gliders was evaluated based on the distance flown. Our glider gave a decent performance but we were happy with what we had achieved as a team.