Benjamin Carpenter OAIRE Week 5

Hi everyone, I’m Benjamin Carpenter and I just completed my 5th week at OAIRE here at Ok State University.

Wow was this week cool! At the beginning of the week I was tasked with making a foam glider using only pieces cut using the foam cutter. On the surface it seemed like a pretty simple task, but a lot of research went into finding the correct formulas and ratios so I would know how big the glider’s pieces should be. I was given very limited instructions, so I had a lot of free range on what I could do. I’m pretty sure all I was given was a wing thickness requirement. I then made all the files and uploaded them to the cutter. The pieces came out great, but the adhesive I was told to use to put it all together didn’t work super well and caused the foam to melt, so I had to make another plane. This time I just used hot glue so my plane wouldn’t start melting. I then put various weights on the front to balance it, and overall it came out pretty good. Both times I used wooden skewers and dowels as spars to held hold everything together. Then Carter, one of the 3 high school interns suggested that we make another plane out of the pink foam that we had left. We had already made some larger wings a few weeks ago as tests, so we decided to use those and make a plane that was scaled to that. We greatly underestimated how big this plane would be, but we kept going anyway. Once we had all the pieces cut out, we realized that this glider was going to be almost 5 feet long, with a 6 foot wingspan. Carter then suggested that we add electronics to both the smaller plane and the big pink one. Tanner, our “supervisor” (he is in charge of the intern program but he’s busy a lot so we don’t really have adult supervision) thought this was a great idea, so we began looking online for parts. That concluded our week, and hopefully next week we can get both planes put together and flying. Next week should also be our flight day with the AREN team, but that’s if wind allows.

See you next week!

Here is one of the sketches I made while designing the small glider.

I found some silkworms in a tree and thought they were pretty cool

Here is the small black glider (completely assembled) next to the pink glider’s pieces