It may seem odd, but paper airplanes have their own niche. There are books, design patterns, and now a 3D printed paper airplane machine gun. Dieter Krone seems to have cornered that niche in many ways, focusing on this unlikely, yet universal, do-it-yourself topic.
The Mechanics of a Paper Airplane Machine Gun
The paper airplane gun is designed with 3D printed parts manufactured by fabberhouse.de. It takes standard A6 paper, and folds it inside the housing attached to the gun’s grips. This is done using an internal roller/ridged channel system. Appropriately, across the outside of the case it says “A6 v1.0”.
After it finishes folding the airplane, it launches it out of a slot in the front. This is all automatic. When the gun runs, you can hear the motors taken from an electric screwdriver spinning, driving the mechanism. Check it out for yourself in the video below:
fabberhouse is an on demand printing service out of Germany. A good comparative service is the better known Shapeways, although fabberhouse doesn’t seem to have as flexible of a process for ordering prints. Based on this service, it’s safe to say the gun was printed in standard ABS.
Krone’s Creation
The inventor that developed this masterpiece is Dieter Michael Krone from Germany. He’s a mechanical engineer and paper airplane enthusiast. Krone has even written a book on the topic. His site goes into extensive detail about paper airplanes, including instructions and the qualities of different paper that could potentially be used in making them. It’s in German, but Google translate does a decent job of making it readable if you don’t speak the language.
Image courtesy of derwesten.de
He even discusses the physics involved and paper airplane competitions on his site. It’s kind of an amazing niche to discover; it is even taken to a competitive level several times a year.
Paper airplanes aside, one of the most fascinating aspects of this project is that it shows 3D printing used to rapidly prototype a niche device designed to make, effectively, another device. The result is a printed paper airplane printer (or folder, as the case may be). The outcome almost echoes some of the sentiment of the RepRap project’s ultimate goal of printing printers. 3D printing can make it easier to make other things. If you are tech savvy, having a 3D printer at home would be the best way to quickly iterate through designs till we find the right process that works. It can be a fantastic gateway to at-home manufacturing, even if all you are manufacturing are paper airplanes.
