Fold Epic Paper Airplanes
187 points by vismit2000 2 hours ago | 41 comments

HelloUsername 2 hours ago
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chrisweekly 52 minutes ago
Thanks! https://foldnfly.com is so much better than the spammy nonsense linked in tfa.
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clarkmoody 5 minutes ago
Looked pretty good until the anti-ad-blocker message blocked the entire content of the site.
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intrasight 18 minutes ago
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

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jnellis 6 minutes ago
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.
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yial 16 minutes ago
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.
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magicalhippo 27 minutes ago
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.

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fifilura 2 hours ago
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.

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JKCalhoun 27 minutes ago
How I felt not having square origami paper as a kid.

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

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fifilura 19 minutes ago
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?

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WillAdams 52 minutes ago
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.

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bombcar 46 minutes ago
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)

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janaagaard 44 minutes ago
> 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.

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JKCalhoun 24 minutes ago
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.
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fifilura 26 minutes ago
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.

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derdrdirk 2 hours ago
Wouldn't have expected 40min video to fold an airplane: https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/lancer!
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Betelbuddy 54 minutes ago
And they dont even throw it at the end...I guess these are real aircraft engineers
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Bengalilol 49 minutes ago
@2:13, there's some test flight (?) that looks engineer-ish
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ashenke 48 minutes ago
They throw it in the beginning at 2:13
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p2detar 12 minutes ago
Impressive and a bit uncanny, since I was just looking for something like this just yesterday, to help the kids fold.
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andai 2 hours ago
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!)

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vr46 2 hours ago
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.
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kzsh 38 minutes ago
Is this not just a reskin of https://foldnfly.com/ ?
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cube00 2 hours ago
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.

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andai 2 hours ago
I'd watch a 10+ min video on Publisher '97!
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WillAdams 49 minutes ago
Rather sad at work that it is no longer available to subscription folks.
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gspr 45 minutes ago
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!
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mkw5053 19 minutes ago
I’ve been folding A LOT of paper airplanes with my 3-year-old lately so this is perfect timing!
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adg001 43 minutes ago
In hindsight, folding paper airplanes as a kid was the first testbench in rapid prototyping, and a forerunner to the fail fast philosophy.
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contravariant 2 hours ago
Intermediate shows up twice for some reason.
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isaacfrond 2 hours ago
Some reason being the AI messed up?
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archargelod 36 minutes ago
- 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?

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nickludlam 11 minutes ago
Same! When I encountered the mail popup it looked like I had accidentally drag-selected the entire website, and got extremely confused
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drbscl 15 minutes ago
The mail popup crashed my browser (safari on iOS)
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twodave 17 minutes ago
I wasn’t patient enough to go past that first one.
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bix6 25 minutes ago
Crashed my browser.
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NookDavoos 2 hours ago
Too bad its just a bunch of youtube videos. Still cool!
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gspr 2 hours ago
The first thing on the page is the book they sell!
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mrngld 52 minutes ago
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

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bovermyer 2 hours ago
Some really fascinating designs in there. I might have to have a go at making the Quill!
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boxed 23 minutes ago
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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moeenmirza707 31 minutes ago
[flagged]
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