Delta Wing Walk Along Glider Experiment

Experimented on making a delta wing glider design. Flies slow and steady. I put the elevator tabs on the centre line. This way a slight difference in the angle of the elevons of each side does not cause a very large tilt or turn as I found happens if the elevons are far apart and closer to the outer edges of the wing. I also split the elevons into two sections on either side so I could get finer adjustments in lift / glide angle.

You also need to angle the board slightly more than done with a jagwing or bug to give uniform updraft to the large delta wing area from nose to trailing edge.

I used a plastic drinking straw for nose weight. It is very stiff even in thin strips so once you have snipped a thin strip (about 2mm width) to the right length to balance the nose weight, it then later does not sag and cause a shift in C.G.

The dihedral angle is also very small.

The foam used was what is commonly called “thermacole” in India and was sliced to about 0.5 mm thickness using a 36 gauge nichrome wire.

Another experiment – the thin foam was directly printed on an inkjet printer. It worked just fine. Since most inkjet printers can easily take up to 200 gsm thick paper, thin foam that is just about as thick as normal 80 gsm printer paper does not seem to have any problem going through the printer. My fear that the ink would smudge since the foam is not as absorbent as paper was also dispelled. I first put it through in fast draft mode to keep the ink flow minimum. When it showed no print problems, I put another sheet in normal print mode. Still encountered no problems due to more ink flow.
You can now jazz up your glider in multicolour. Let your imagination soar. A printer where the paper feed goes from the back to the front rather than one where the feed is from the front and the paper rolls around and comes back out in front would probably prevent any cracking or jamming of the foam sheet. Anyway try it out on whatever type of printer you have. Thin foam is very paper like in flexibility so there may not be any problems.

The template for this glider is here.
There is one I coloured and one with just the required basic outlines for you to embellish
Import it into your graphic software – add your decals or other embellishments – print out. You can even scale the size up or down and see its flight characteristics.
Soar away with your jazzed up delta wing glider.

Video of foam printing in action and delta wing in flight coming soon.

7 thoughts on “Delta Wing Walk Along Glider Experiment

    1. Hi Slater, – Uploaded a video of the Delta Wing in action last night. Search for Delta Wing Walk Along Gliding on YouTube.
      Anant

      1. I added the video to the post. Did I get the right one?

        All I did was get the youtube link on my clipboard and paste it into the post using right-click-paste-as-plain.

        1. Hi Rishi,

          Once you slice the foam into a thin sheet of 0.5 mm it goes through the printer like a normal sheet of paper. I also found the ink does not seem to blot or smudge

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