K.J. Dinakaran (40), a private packing and clearing agent, doesn’t regard plastic straw as waste. He has used it along with pieces of styrofoam plates to come up with an indoor free flight.
This flight with a 30-cm-long body made up of two straws and wings of styrofoam flies continuously for about 30 seconds when its connected to the 150 mah Bluetooth headset battery. “I use this model to give basic knowledge about aviation to beginners,” he says. Apart from his two children, the younger ones in the locality in Attavar are fond of this new object, he says. Mr. Dhinakaran, a native of Coimbatore who dropped out of Diploma in Electrical and Electronics course, developed a fascination for aero modelling since he was 12. “When I was in Class 7, a friend of my brother gave me an old flying object that he had discarded. It was when I developed interest in this.”
Mr. Dhinakaran has used balsa wood and other material to come up with various forms of launch gliders. After doing a few hand-launch gliders using straws, Mr. Dhinakaran ventured into making an indoor free flight powered by a Bluetooth headset battery.
It took nearly eight months to come up with a stable model of an indoor free flight. He fixed a small propeller to the 3.7 volt coreless motor in the front of the flight and made elliptical wings and horizontal and vertical stables in the tail using styrofoam. Mr. Dhinakaran said that he had to conduct a lot of trail flights to come up with the right kind of battery for the motor. “I first tried using batteries of a digital watch. Ultimately, I opted for Bluetooth headset battery,” he says.
To ensure more flying hours, Mr. Dhinakaran has created a mechanism to recharge the Bluetooth headset battery using three pen torch cells that extend the flying time of the flight by a few more minutes.
