SAFMC 2026 Glider competition

I finished making the 2nd glider that I will test, this time I designed the glider to have a longer fuselage then wingspan, this will let it fly as if it were a rocket, it is also really light

I finished completely cutting out all the parts and then test fitting them to see if they would fit for my 2nd, smaller glider. This glider which I am designing is designed to fly straight and fast, allowing for accurate targeting, It is also designed to be the lightest of all my gliders. This glider has 350mm long fuselage and 300mm wing with a bar rectangular shape. Tomorrow when I will glue this glider together, I will change the wing shape into a more curved shape to reduce induced drag vortices which could steal kinetic energy from the glider through air resistance which in flight. I also made a few minor changes to the design such as rounding all the measurements to whole numbers. Here is a picture of my almost completed parts as they still need sanding

I finished the 3rd and final design of my glider

this time instead of using 50cm x 8cm wing I changed to a small 30cm x 8cm wing followed by a 35cm long fuselage, These design choices will help the plane travel straight and fast akin to a rocket or fighter jet compared to glider

I also ended up choosing a design where the wing is directly inserted into the fuselage through a small slit instead of being stuck on top with glue, This directly increases structural integrity and stops the shockwave which is produced when the nose directly crashes into ground from ripping the wings apart which is what we saw happened with the earlier prototype
the wing has a exact aspect ratio of 1:6,

I made my first glider… And broke however it did tell me quite a lot about what I need to do to make a good, strong glider

Lapse ain’t syncing, I have a hour long video in lapse that refuses to sync, please help

Developed the 2nd final design contestant for my final glider.

This glider still features the same mid-body hook however instead of processing elliptical wings, It possess tapered wings.

The wings are still 50cm x 8cm from the previous design and the fuselage is still 40cm long, All materials and their thicknesses are the same.

I came up with a final design which uses the elliptical wings and a mid-body hook fuselage (the hook is in the middle section of the fuselage), The wing is to be made of 2x 2.5mm balsa wood sheets stacked together on top and the fuselage is to be made of a single layer 6mm balsa wood sheet, The tail of the aircraft is to be made of a single layer of 2.5mm balsa wood sheet

Today, I decided to do math to figure out the mass, wing loading and launch velocity, All the math I did is most likely highly theoretical however, I was able to finalize my specs for this, I have decided to aim for 70 grams of mass with a wing area of 400cm and a aspect ratio or 1:6.25, This should give me a excellent amount of momentum and penetration power after launch.

The launch force is stipulated to be 4kgf or 32.9 joules

A lot of this math is way of as I am not accounting for everything hence I only real world tests will be able to give me accurate data

I assembled the rest of the combinations in CAD

It was a pain

I started to Assemble a few of the models in CAD.

After messing around in the assembly studio for 30 minutes I was able to assemble my first model

Here is a screenshot of the the model

Designed the fuselage in CAD! I made a fuselage with a hook as at the competition the aircraft will be launched using rubber bands, my 3 designs feature different hook placements to test which is the ideal spot for a hook. The fuselage is made out of 3mm thick balsa wood with thicker 9mm wood upfront to aid with durability and correcting the center of gravity

I made 2 versions of horizontal and vertical stabilizers of different sizes, I intend to test both of them in order to figure out which one of them is the best

I added two new wing profiles of different shapes

I made the wing of the aircraft in On Shape, For the specs of the wing I decided on 50 cm wingspan as it fits between the minimum wingspan of 30cm and maximum wingspan of 60cm, I decided to make the wing out of 2 stacked layers of balsa wood and also decided to add a 3 degree dihedral to the wing for stabilization, This is how the wing currently looks. I do plan to make wings of multiple shapes and iterate on the design as I make and test the wing