Fold Epic Paper Airplanes | Hacker News Reader

Fold Epic Paper Airplanes

foldableflight.com

227 pointsvismit200049 comments

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Related: "https://www.foldnfly.com/"

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Thanks! https://foldnfly.com is so much better than the spammy nonsense linked in tfa.

Looked pretty good until the anti-ad-blocker message blocked the entire content of the site.

Amen! This AI slop has to stop.

I have a story to share. In 1978 as a preteen, my mother made me take piano lessons. God bless her for trying. Anyway, while waiting for my class in the lobby of the music school, I would often make paper airplanes. One day, an older gentleman came over and said that he wanted to gift me something. What he gave me was his copy of "The great international paper airplane book". And remains one of my cherished books or really possessions. But I'm getting older now and feel that the time has come for me to find a 13-year-old worthy of this gift. But it's quite a leap of faith, for me anyway, to convey such a gift.

https://archive.org/details/greatinternation00jerr/mode/1up

I have a copy of this!! It is one of my favorite books on paper airplanes. Great designs, great layout… I’ve occasionally tried modifying some of them to be made out of balsa with various levels of success.

I was reminded of this book immediately! A savior for a boring afternoon. It was like knowing how to tie elaborate knots. You learned some killer designs that made you king of the paper airplane at school.

Yup. In 7th grade during recess we made airplanes. One day I made a Barnaby and threw it up in the air. It caught an updraft and just disappeared into the clouds. With that, I became a paper airplane legend at school.

I'd advise donating to a library if you could fine one. It is difficult to find someone with the aptitude.

My dad worked overtime in the evening a fair bit. He'd often bring me when I was a young teen. The building was several stories tall with a huge open central core, just a flight of stairs on one end.

I'd go to the top floor, take a bunch of paper from the printer room and fold planes, and send them out into the central space. Go back, tweak the design or try something new, launch again.

Don't think I came up with any good designs, but I had a lot of fun trying various ideas.

Wouldn't have expected 40min video to fold an airplane: https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/lancer!

And they dont even throw it at the end...I guess these are real aircraft engineers

@2:13, there's some test flight (?) that looks engineer-ish

They throw it in the beginning at 2:13

I had a book for this when I was a kid, but since I lived in Europe, all I had was A4 format paper and most models were for Letter or folio format!

Obviously the book was translated from US.

I don't remember how bad it was in practice but I remember it made me sad.

Was getting your parents to explain proportion and take scissors to a sheet not an option?

Interestingly, paper A4 wide (210mm?) by letter tall (11") is a thing in the TeX community.

Cutting paper is annoying to get straight without a paper cutter.

That a4 x 11" document size prints correctly on A4 or letter without scaling or cropping (the margins just change)

> take scissors to a sheet not an option?

My experience is that it is quite difficult to cut the sheet precisely enough if you just use a normal pair of scissors.

My technique was always 1) fold along the line you want to cut (makes it straight—maybe parallel if you have a good eye), 2) use your tongue to wet the creased edge, 3) open and re-fold along the same crease but for the opposite side (valley becomes mountain fold), 4) wet the creased edge again… It was easy enough to tear along the fold at that point.

Obviously just an anecdote.

The instructions were just there and I was certain it was the best plane ever if I just had the right paper format. And that they failed had nothing to do with my folding skills.

How I felt not having square origami paper as a kid.

(It's okay, I learned immediately how to rectify, uh, squarify, the situation.)

Yeah, it is easy to try to correct the situation as an adult afterwards. This was just an account of my feelings then.

And as I mentioned below - maybe exactly this was in the way from making the best paper plane ever, that could fly all the way to my neighbour? What did I know?

Nothing will ever replace Campbell Morris' Advanced Paper Aircraft Construction volumes 1-3 (or was it 4) for me, but this looks modern and ideal for young and aspiring ballistic cellulose aeronautical engineers.

That's a cool website. Is there a benchmark for these? I noticed some of these have scores ("Flies over x feet!") and some don't.

Mostly I'm just curious, how well does the standard crappy paper airplane fly, which every kid makes in school, how well does it fly relative to some of these world record winners? (Some of which have a lot more folds and measuring and tape than I was expecting!)

Is this not just a reskin of https://foldnfly.com/ ?

Impressive and a bit uncanny, since I was just looking for something like this just yesterday, to help the kids fold.

Click on the first design, only way to learn how to fold is with a 10 minute YouTube video with plenty of the usual padding to get it to 10 minutes+ and "if you don't have the template" spread throughout.

So basically just buy the $35 worth of books and templates they're selling if you actually want to do this instead of playing and pausing a YT video a hundred times to get through this.

I think I'll fire up Publisher '97 and relive my paper plane memories.

I'd watch a 10+ min video on Publisher '97!

Rather sad at work that it is no longer available to subscription folks.

Come on! They're selling you books in the $20 range and using free (if slightly tedious) videos to promote said books in a polite and non-pushy way. I can't believe this upsets people!

I’ve been folding A LOT of paper airplanes with my 3-year-old lately so this is perfect timing!

Intermediate shows up twice for some reason.

Some reason being the AI messed up?

In hindsight, folding paper airplanes as a kid was the first testbench in rapid prototyping, and a forerunner to the fail fast philosophy.

Yes. Personal anecdote. I won the 1978 UCLA paper airplane contest by exactly this method.

There was a good design floating around (locally?) called a Pasquali [1]. In the couple of hours before the contest. I folded about a dozen of the design and tested them. The individual plane that flew best is the one that I flew in the contest.

(If you happen to know the UCLA campus, the plane was launched from the top of Boelter Hall -- about 3 floors up from memory. It flew all the way across the Engineering Quad to the raised courtyard between the Geology and Chemistry buildings.)

[1] If anybody here happens to know of this design, I've forgotten all of the details other than the name. I'd love to recover it! Sadly, the actual paper airplane is long lost.

- Annoying mail popup that returns after being closed and is not remembered on refresh

- Every action takes 3-10 seconds, including pressing on regular ass links

- There's a big yellow button "Fold planes" on main page that redirects you to the main page?

- Login is a blue text on blue background

- You have to click on the image of the plane to get to it's page, clicking on text doesn't work (small thing, but very unintuitive)

Is there something wrong with my browser, or it's a website?

Crashed my browser.

I wasn’t patient enough to go past that first one.

The mail popup crashed my browser (safari on iOS)

Same! When I encountered the mail popup it looked like I had accidentally drag-selected the entire website, and got extremely confused

Get an adblocker like a normal person.

I use uBlock Origin on Firefox. Makes no difference.

Too bad its just a bunch of youtube videos. Still cool!

The first thing on the page is the book they sell!

Effective marketing, since the first thing I thought was "$20? Unusual white elephant gift, I may have to get this"

If you're interested the link to the other related site has more step by step instructions: https://www.foldnfly.com/#/1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-1

Some really fascinating designs in there. I might have to have a go at making the Quill!

My son watched a ton of this at age ~8 or so. He built some really crazy stuff from memory and our house was full of great designs for like a year. Pretty great channel imo.

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