I met up with a couple of guys last weekend who are flying indoor rubber powered planes. I've built some rubber powered planes in the past - a couple of cheap outdoor ARFs (kind of like what Hobbyking now sells) and several scratchbuilt.

I've always used regular rubber bands with my scratchbuilds because it wasn't anything I took seriously. Most of my freeflight planes were and still are gliders. So, the guys "donated" to me several length of TAN rubber and I tried it on a couple of planes I brought along and WOW.. didn't know they could fly like that! One of my planes flew for over 45 seconds! (Now, this is nothing to what the guys flew. They average 3 minutes in the hall. But my plane never flew for more than 10 seconds before!).

So. Now that I'm starting to seriously look into rubber powered flight I find myself in need of a winder. 200+ winds is doable by hand but 1000+? No way! I was planning on buying one but my nearest LHS did not have any. Not wanting to wait any longer I decided to try and see if I can build one.

So here's the result. Sorry, no build pics. Took me 3 hours from idea to finished product. The gears are from an old CDROM drive that I disassembled for the brushless motor last year. It's the bit that controls the tray. The rest are just scraps of building materials I had lying around. Liberally spray the whole thing with silicone oil and presto! Works perfectly!

The gear ratio is a bit odd though. It's 9.25:1. So every 10 turns I get 92.5 winds. I guess I'll simply count to 11 for every 100 and live with the extra 1 3/4 turns. It's good enough for now.