Today, as bombs fell on Baghdad, Kevin and I began work on his science fair project. The goal– to build a helicopter with rotors powered by model rocket engines. $40 at the hobby shop (balsa wood and glue is expensive) and hardware store later, we were measuring, cutting, and gluing together a strange beast of an airframe based on a 1? by 1/4? backbone and a series of 4 A-frames and two pairs of skids. The result looks like a scale model saw-horse collection. We also built the first rotor from 3? of balsa wing; our initial attempts to build an axle for the rotor from a wooden dowel were aborted when we realized how hard it would be to stabilize and transfer lift to the airframe from it.
Over lunch, we discussed the various laws of physics that we were going to need to take into account as we built this strange bird. It?s great that his sixth grade science class is so focused on physics right now–we can talk about Bernoulli and Newton and apply what he?s learning now directly to this project.
Now, to get it to fly will take more than physics. But he does go to Catholic school…..
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on Saturday, March 22nd, 2003 at 4:10 am and is filed under globals, Family.
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Today, as bombs fell on Baghdad, Kevin and I began work on his science fair project. The goal– to build a helicopter with rotors powered by model rocket engines. $40 at the hobby shop (balsa wood and glue is expensive) and hardware store later, we were measuring, cutting, and gluing together a strange beast of an airframe based on a 1? by 1/4? backbone and a series of 4 A-frames and two pairs of skids. The result looks like a scale model saw-horse collection. We also built the first rotor from 3? of balsa wing; our initial attempts to build an axle for the rotor from a wooden dowel were aborted when we realized how hard it would be to stabilize and transfer lift to the airframe from it.
Over lunch, we discussed the various laws of physics that we were going to need to take into account as we built this strange bird. It?s great that his sixth grade science class is so focused on physics right now–we can talk about Bernoulli and Newton and apply what he?s learning now directly to this project.
Now, to get it to fly will take more than physics. But he does go to Catholic school…..
This entry was posted
on Saturday, March 22nd, 2003 at 4:10 am and is filed under globals, Family.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.