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.
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| Early construction phase, securing the wings and engine supports |
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| 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. |
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| Close details of the heavy duty winch, with buffers to keep the cable in the drum, about 1m of cable is available. |
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| Engine support: I added straps for extra help |
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| It starts to take shape |
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| This work space keeps getting improved every week! |
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| Staple gun used to reinforce the straps and keep them in place |
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| Belly of the fuselage, shampoo bottles used as engines |
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| L-Shapes supports for the back tires. |
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| Front tires, taken from a curtain system. Tires can fully rotate |
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| Securing the hook, I used superglue to make sure it won't come off |
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| Securing the "engines" onto the wing, glue + plastic straps |
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| Rudder & back engines made of used batteries. Some details of the winch is shown too. |
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| Plane is ready for test flight |
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| Let me see if I can make it fly ! |
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| Plane in action, lifting heavy goods here and there |
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| 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 |
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| The cradle is made out of an empty USB box, I used fish thread for the slings |
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| Plane - Right side. The idea of shampoo bottles is to fill them with water for extra fun (fuel level / fire extinguisher) |
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| Plane - Left side |
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| 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!..
