Gareth Branwyn is a freelance writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture. He is currently a contributor to Boing Boing, Wink Books, and Wink Fun. His free weekly-ish maker tips newsletter can be found at garstipsandtools.com.
Here’s a video of a scratch-built “foamy” R/C model of a seaplane that can actually take off and land on water. “Foamies” is the name given to the class of model planes built out of the insulation foam that can be found at home/hardware stores.
There are several types of foam aircraft out there. One of the more popular is EPP foam. This foam resulted from Cisco’s research into packaging foam and is incredibly damage resistant. Cisco had been shipping very expensive routers all over during the internet boom, and many of them were destroyed enroute by bad handling. So they dropped a few million on foam research, and voila, we have EPP. I’ve had several flying wings made of it, and you could fly them into a chain link fence at 50mph, and just pick them up and fly them again immediately. The only down side is that unlike styrofoam(which is also used), it’s not stiff enough on it’s own, so you have to use a spar for stiffness, usually a carbon fiber arrow shaft cut to length.
Happy skies!
Johnnysays:
A simple webcam attached and using a custom iPad application to view and control the airplane.
Gareth Branwyn is a freelance writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture. He is currently a contributor to Boing Boing, Wink Books, and Wink Fun. His free weekly-ish maker tips newsletter can be found at garstipsandtools.com.
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There are several types of foam aircraft out there. One of the more popular is EPP foam. This foam resulted from Cisco’s research into packaging foam and is incredibly damage resistant. Cisco had been shipping very expensive routers all over during the internet boom, and many of them were destroyed enroute by bad handling. So they dropped a few million on foam research, and voila, we have EPP. I’ve had several flying wings made of it, and you could fly them into a chain link fence at 50mph, and just pick them up and fly them again immediately. The only down side is that unlike styrofoam(which is also used), it’s not stiff enough on it’s own, so you have to use a spar for stiffness, usually a carbon fiber arrow shaft cut to length.
Happy skies!
A simple webcam attached and using a custom iPad application to view and control the airplane.
COOL !!
That looks like FUN!