Build and Grow Planes

  The next set of toys in the build and grow series is the planes.  I had a lot of fun designing them.  As usual, they were a lot bigger in my mind than in real life.  They were a lot of fun to build even though they were on the smaller side.  I had to make some concessions with my design criteria.  I needed to introduce some nonstandard thicknesses.  The wings just did not look good on ¾” material so I reduced it down to 5/16” but ¼” will also work. 

There are four different planes and I will go into each one and some of the difficulties and things that I liked about them.  They all had all there difficult parts and it was fun working through them.  There are a couple of things that I did different with this design.  First was that I printed the patterns on card stock so that I could trace the patterns on the wood.  The second is that I am batching several of them out in different woods.

The Helicopter

It seems like a pretty basic design until I realized the cuts on two faces and the holes that I needed to drill.  So I marked out the pattern and the holes on the body.  Cut all the lines from both directions leaving about ¼” between the two cuts so that I do not have to tape the part back on.  After the body was cut out, I finished the cuts on the sides.

The next challenge was the small parts.  I realize quickly that there were a lot of parts that I was not comfortable cutting on the table saw or chop saw. I used the band saw a lot on these parts. I am now looking into an 1/8” blade for the band saw.  The skids on the landing platform I changed after I cut them out.  They were originally going to be doweled.  They are no longer that way.  There really was no reason to do so because it is face grain to face grain bond.  I also have widened them a little from the original design.

The Jet

This is pretty much a scroll saw and sanding operation.  There are small pieces but I liked how well it came out.  It is definitely the easiest of the planes to make.

The Bi-Plane.

This was another project where it was helpful to have the band saw around.  The only thing that I needed to keep together was the wings. I drilled the top and bottom wings strut holes taped together since I was making 12 of them.  I marked the top and bottom of each.  That face was sanded after everything was assembled.

The Prop Plane

This one was modeled after the first plane that I did.  The wings have a 5 degree tilt on them.  I was pretty confident that this plane would not be a huge problem.  I did the same thing with the multiple cuts as I did on the helicopter body.  I then cut the taper on the bottom.  When it came to putting the groove for the wings in, I had a problem.  The part was much smaller than the original design.  I needed some way to cut this groove safely.  I used a miter gauge and a sacrificial extension.  Looking back, I should have put the five degree angle on the extension.  I had a problem keeping the bottom flat because it was small and liked to rotate.  This did not give me a consistent groove depth over the part.

I liked how they turned out.  I was different using harder woods of half of them.  This is why I was grateful for the band saw.  I could do them with the scroll saw, but it would have taken a lot longer.