Wooden toys: Aircraft

It is a known fact that children love to play more with wooden than plastic ones. I made for my kids a wooden toy in the shape of a plane, that had a winch on top of it, so that they could hook stuff and have some good time. I noticed that they tend to like hooking stuff, they trashed a previous crane they had, and kept just the hook part of it and played with it for weeks. This lead me to the idea of making a hook and winch with their aircraft.
Anyway, the following are just sharing some ideas on how you could also make similar toys for your kids to keep them busy for a while. With my two boys giving hard tests to every single toy they have, and knowing their aptitude to give each toy a Go-No Go test, I decided to make their plane heavy duty to resist rough tests and to survive for at least a week (the previous prototype made of plastic survived only a day!).
It has now been over 3 months and the plane is still surviving, so I guess my clients are happy...

Steps for building the wooden plane:
I wanted the plane to be made of recycled parts, so many components were just used to act as raw materials for new uses. I left the plane unpainted to avoid any issue of toxicity etc., after all, nothing is better than natural wood.

Early construction phase, securing the wings and engine supports

Crane, fully rotational with guide for the cable, the knob will lift the  hooked load. The whole mechanism is much more complex than it looks and it took more than a couple of hours to have all the parts drilled and put in place.

Close details of the heavy duty winch, with buffers to keep the cable in the drum, about 1m of cable is available.

Engine support: I added straps for extra help

It starts to take shape

This work space keeps getting improved every week!

Staple gun used to reinforce the straps and keep them in place

Belly of the fuselage, shampoo bottles used as engines

L-Shapes supports for the back tires.

Front tires, taken from a curtain system. Tires can fully rotate

Securing the hook, I used superglue to make sure it won't come off

Securing the "engines" onto the wing, glue + plastic straps

Rudder & back engines made of used batteries. Some details of the winch is shown too.

Plane is ready for test flight

Let me see if I can make it fly !

Plane in action, lifting heavy goods here and there

Cradle for lifting goods, kids like it as they can carry some cars inside it, they like to make it free fall due to weight then winch it up

The cradle is made out of an empty USB box, I used fish thread for the slings

Plane - Right side. The idea of shampoo bottles is to fill them with water for extra fun (fuel level / fire extinguisher)

Plane - Left side

Plane, over 3 months old and still surviving.

Plane performance:

I have seen the plane dragging about a large 12KG toy basket across the floor and across the living room carpet, so that winch, cable & crane did a perfect job resisting the test. I guess that was the heaviest item the kids managed to find, they got scolded hard after that, as that was really pushing the plane to extreme limits!..