If you can draw an airplane on paper, you could be well on your way to making a (toy) plane in real life. Just check out this project from maker and blogger Matt Butchard. He created a remote controlled toy plane using a 3Doodler, a $99, pen-like, hand-held 3-D printer.
Butchard created the plane's frame with the 3Doodler, then covered the wings with this specialized tissue. So far, he's posted one solid powered test flight to YouTube. The plane definitely goes for a few seconds before stalling and crashing, which damaged it enough so that he couldn't fly it again. But the silver lining is that the 3Doodler makes the damage easy to fix.
Popular Science has covered the 3Doodler before. We even took a quick video of an early version of the pen at work, making tiny 3-D springs:
Since 3Doodler began selling its pen, users have made some pretty cool things with it. Butchard made this adorable Johnny Five, using a variety of colors that would be difficult to achieve with a desktop 3-D printer. And the store of the Museum of Modern Art recently displayed some sophisticated 3Doodler art.
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