Hello, dear hobbyists! It’s quite a while since I went in for RC aircraft modeling, and it was then that I came across a video. It all but knocked me off my chair: it showed little planes hovering for about 10 minutes. I thought those were some extremely sophisticated RC aircraft. After digging a bit of info, I realized that those were rubber-band balsa planes and I wouldn’t make one, so I exited the page. Well, I’ve been in it for 2 years, so I have come across the vid again. It is summer, so I don’t need to go to school and have plenty of time. I read some forums and, to my great frustration, I realized that I was too broke to buy balsa (I do have a little cash, but I need to buy equipment for my RC Cessna). My great thanks to Vyacheslav Tchabanenko for a decent piece of advice! Straw is a material that paves my way. We have bluegrass growing in our yard: just go and take as much as you can hande! Then I found a simple drawing and built the aircraft. And now let me tell you how Ito build a decent piece without a penny in the wallet. Here are the specifications:Weight: 0,8 gWingspan: 160 mmLength of the fuselage: 130 mmDuration of flight: 30 sec

First, we need a straw, a coffee stirrer, superglue, a piece of thin wire (used for connecting electrical cords, you can buy it at an electrical store), a sheet of paper, and a little package. Let’s go! Please, start with the engine. The following parts should come first: a washer (a 1.5 mm thick paper curl rolled around the piece of wire), a lug (a 4 mm piece of straw), hooks, blades (IMPORTANT: please, make blades out of the notebook sheet), and a straw, by which you are going to attach the blades. Then assemble it as shown in the following picture (IMPORTANT: it is advisable to attach the blades at the last moment). Glue this whole mechanism and the hook to the 135-mm-long fuselage bar. I think that takeoff and landing are the most spectacular moments, so how can a plane land or take off without landing gear? I made gear legs out of 80-mm-long straws. Then I attached a 20-mm-long stick at 85 mm from the end (the stick holds the wings). You may choose not to attach anything to the gear legs’ ends.Now let’s make the second wing-mounting part. It consists of two straws – a thin and a little thicker one. Connect them by inserting the thin straw into the thick one. The whole rod should be 20 mm long, This is to adjust the wing angle (to make the plane fly smoothly). Now the wings: build the body, cover the wings with polyethylene film (greased the body with a glue stick and put it on the smoothed-out pies of film; use a hair dryer to smooth it out), and bend the ends.

Attach wings to the fuselage. Build an empennage. Use a medium-thick 115-mm-long straw as a tailboom.Attach the empennage.Now it’s time to put it all together. Make a rubber band out of a piece of rubber, which is used in household. Pull six 500-mm threads out of it and tie them together. Here it is, ready to take off. You can hand-launch it or take off. Here is a little video. Sorry for the poor quality!