Skip to main content

Lego and Paper Aeroplanes - Two of My Favorite Things

Paper Plane that I designed several
years ago. Yes it flies!
Two of my favorite things that have persisted from my childhood is building Lego models with Lego Technic and trying to design realistic looking paper planes that fly.

Lego bricks are something that my parents introduced me to early on. As I got older I gravitated towards Lego Technic where I spent many years trying to create my own, fully working version of a car chassis.  Even though I was lucky enough to own Lego's version two car chassis (set 8860) - which I think was loosely based on a Volks Wagon, with the motor in the rear.

Even today I own a modest collection of Lego Technic sets which I potter around with, mostly trying to build car chassis' with but occasionally other things, like robots too (though I've never gotten far with robots because I don't have any motors or any of the Lego Mindstorm kits).

Designing realistic paper planes (ones that look more like real planes) that fly was something I got into during secondary school, usually at the end of a day when teachers would hand out school notes to take home to parents. Often these notes would be accompanied by long boring monologues by teachers, adding further information. A lot of my notes got folded into paper planes.

Just to make it more interesting I set myself a challenge to try and make planes that looked more like actual planes, and they had to 'fly' to be a success. They didn't have to fly well. The just had to fly in a controlled glide of reasonable distance, remaining the correct way up until they landed. One other rule I had was no tearing of the paper. The plane had to be folded from a single sheet of paper.

I've designed several working paper planes along with a series of 'conversion' folds that can be applied to a couple of standard planes that'll turn them into more realistic looking planes that still fly reasonably well, even outdoors. I used to even have a website complete with folding instructions.

With the above in mind, imagine how cool it was to me to come across someone who has made a Lego Technic, Paper Plane Folding Machine. See the video below.



Granted the paper plane it makes is one of the worst paper plane designs ever (isn't heavy enough in the nose section to really fly well) but still, it's very cool.

I think I just found a new challenge with my own Lego Technic bricks... make a paper plane folding machine for a better design of paper plane. That would be quite a challenge!
TET Life Topics:

Comments

  1. Mum60March 21, 2013 8:54 PM

    Now, now, you haven't got time to play around with Leggo and paper aeroplanes! Would be a change from all the computer stuff though - a sort of 'time out' recreation!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated by an actual human (me, TET) and may not publish right away. I do read all comments and only reject those not directly related to the post or are spam/scams (I'm looking at you Illuminati recruiters... I mean scammers. Stop commenting on my Illuminati post!).

Buy Gifts and Apparel featuring art by TET.

Popular posts from this blog

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices.  My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe?  Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...
3 comments
Continue Reading »

The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Image to Video Generator to Animate Art That Started as a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch

B ack in October of 2023 I used Prome AI's Sketch Rendering feature to color a 23 year old rough pen sketch I did of a princess watching butterflies, sitting next to a waterfall in the forest. You can read more about that in my previous article,  The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Art Generator to Color and Enhance a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch The three images I used to create my final image (bottom right). Notice how closely the AI has followed my line art sketch (top left) but in the first image (top right) has misinterpreted the waterfall as some kind of large tree stump. Prome's render of the artwork was pretty good but I did end up creating a composite image myself from two of the best renders, to get my final image. Since then AI Image to Video has come a long way, particularly when it comes to creating animation from artwork and maintaining the art style for the whole generation. AI still does much better with turning photographic images to video but I found ...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Second Sunday Skateboard Session Ep 2 - Some Improvements

TET heelflip - looking better but still not a land. A s of writing this I've stuck to my plan of filming myself skate every second Sunday. By the time this post goes up I will have three episodes done. As part of that goal I am also skating more between episodes, about every second to third day for an hour, practicing Braille's Skateboarding Made Simple, Volume 1. That said, I'm not posting these videos here immediately after they're posted to my @TETLife YouTube Channel because I only post an article once a week, and that would make every second article a Sunday Session post. These posts are really so I can add some additional thoughts after the fact, and, of course, because this blog is about all things that interest me, of which skateboarding is one of them. In episode two I had intended to speak to camera more than I do but my driveway is right next door to my neighbor's shed/workshop, and I get a little self-conscious if I'm not too sure whether he's th...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Australian Federal Election 2025 - The Australian Democrats (Please Like Us Again) and The Greens

Image: Reve AI T here's not much to be said about the current Australian Democrats other than in 2025 Australian election, in May, they'll be out there hoping they win a seat... any seat... 'please like us again!' The Australian Democrats For just over two decades, from the late seventies onward, the Australian Democrats were the third most important party in the Federal government (if you don't count the National party since they've been on that coalition ticket with the Liberals for as long as I can remember). In fact, once I moved away from the Labor party, they were my top pick until the party slowly imploded in the early 2000's from a series of unfortunate events like leaders defecting to other parties, and a highly publicised incident of drunkenness, bullying, and abuse from a male party leader to a female colleague. It's been two decades since then (and that guy's with the Greens now)... please like us again! That aside, the party is still t...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

The Australian Federal Election 2025 Could Be a Win For Independents

Australian Democrats founder, Senator Don Chipp, embodied the role of minor parties holding the balance of power with his quote of "keep the bastards honest." Photo Manipulated Caricature by TET. A s of writing this, the actual Australian Federal Election date has yet to be announced, as our Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, attempts to keep the focus on the fallout of severe weather events in Queensland, however it's looking likely that some time in May is the safest bet. Despite this, all parties have been hard at campaigning, with smaller parties, and in particular, conservative independent candidates, seemingly rallying together to make sure people know how much influence they can have just by preventing the two major parties (Labor and the Liberal/National coalition) from having a majority in either (or both) houses of parliament. They're also doing their part to make sure voters finally understand that preferential voting works in everybody's favor over one ...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Boom Crash Opera Born Classic But Not Again

Boom Crash Opera are an Australian Band that reached the peak of their popularity in the mid to late nineteen eighties. They are a band that I knew about at that time but was never really excited by until they released their ill fated double album Born and Born Again in 1995 (Album cover pictured). At the time of its release I was very much into emerging Australian musical acts and was also looking out for new sounds that were different and had kind of a futuristic/electronic sound. Artists that I was buying at the time included; Swoop , Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Its Self . As well as a really interesting release by David Bowie, the concept album, Outside . Born was a fairly radical departure for Boom Crash Opera (BCO). The first single, Gimme , was often compared to the sounds of Gary Glitter, particularly his single, Rock n Roll part 2 , because of the pounding drum loops. Watch the video below. My favorite single from the album is dissemble which probably went now...
16 comments
Continue Reading »

Australian Federal Election 2025 - The Major Parties and Their Promises

T he Australian Federal Election date has now been announced as May 3rd, 2025. As such I thought it might be interesting to explore some of the parties and candidates in a series of articles leading up to a final wrap up in the days after the winners are announced. This is by no means an unbiased viewpoint. I've said many times my political leanings are to the woke left because those people are way better at embracing casual Friday at work (though some of the more extremist left do have to be reminded clothes are still a mandatory requirement). The obvious place to start is with the two most boring centralist parties pretending to be either left or right but actually doing their best impression of 'cake' - everybody likes cake! The Australian Labor Party Otherwise known as the incumbent, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese vying for his second term. The party is campaigning on seven key points including: Helping with the cost of living. Free GP visits & even cheaper m...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »