Dance a little Jig.

When I was maybe 13, my parents got me a rubber band powered airplane kit for Christmas.  It wasn't the one I wanted, but it turned out to be even better.  I wanted a fancy big one that looked like a real airplane.  This thing was a decent size, but only a "silhouette" plane.  Turns out that was a good thing- easy to build, and it flew great!  My friend was jealous of how well it flew compared to his (which, as I recall, he built using contact cement meant for concrete flooring...)

Fast forward 20 years.  My Tech and Design 2 class, according to the class description, builds rubber band powered airplanes.  The kits that were left over were the "Super Delta Dart", so I gave them a shot.  They. Sucked.  Very easy to build, but on average maybe 2 out of 18-20 in a class flew WELL.  They were very flimsy and were always breaking too.  Last year I decided to give that old kit a try, as it is STILL in production!  Made by SIG- called the Parasol.

It worked out great!  Most of the planes flew well, the build is easy, and they are fairly sturdy.  Little more spendy, but well worth it in my opinion.  One problem though-  Gluing the wings together took about 5 minutes and then a full day to set up.  Gluing the tail- same thing.  Gluing the tail to the fuselage- another day.  Annddd... one more day for the wings and struts.  That is a LOT of wasted time.  We used it to our advantage though, studied a bit more on flight, etc, but I wanted to cut the time of this unit way down because of changes to schedules and switching to trimesters.

The OLD way of doing it:



The solution:  Build a jig that will hold all of the completed parts- tail, fuselage, wings, and struts, all at the same time, so they can be glued at once and dry overnight.








 To top it all off, I had my Metals and Engines 2 class build me a truckload of them as a review of metal working.  Now I have 12 jigs, should make things go pretty quick!

Pattern for the jigs:


Gobs done, just need some planes to glue up!
z