How To Make a Wooden Toy Plane From Scrap Pieces of Wood

In this video I show you how easy it is to make a wooden toy plane from beautiful scrap pieces of wood. I don’t own much woodworking tools and I want to show you that you don’t need a lot of fancy tools to get amazing results. This is illustrated by the wooden toy airplane that I show you at the end of this video. It is made out of ash, cherry, american oak and beech wood. The plan that I follow comes originally from Woodworking for Mere Mortals .

Video transcript:

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. In this video I will show you how to make a nice wooden toy airplane out of some scrap pieces of wood. Have fun watching.

To make this toy airplane I got this plan off of Woodworking for Mere Mortals. I will try to follow that plan as good as I possibly can with the tools that I have. I will be making this toy airplane as a gift for my niece. She turns one in about a week so this will be a nice little gift.

Here you can see the plan in a little bit more detail. I will put a link in the description below so you can download it yourself and start making your own wooden toy airplanes. The wings will be made out of two pieces of cherry. I already cut them to size two years ago. The tail wing will also be made out of a piece of cherry. Then to make the propeller I got myself a little piece of American oak and I got some dowels in different sizes to make the landing gear or the wheel support according to the plan and because I will be making a biplane I need some struts. The plan also asks for wheels and actually recommends store-bought wheels because it’s quite difficult to make your own wheels if you don’t have the proper tools so I follow that recommendation and got myself these two wheels. The fuselage is one thing that I didn’t prepare yet. The plan asked for 18 millimeters thick wood. I have a piece of 20 millimeters thick ash wood that I will use to make the fuselage out of.

So both of the wings, the tail wing, the fuselage and the propeller are roughly cut to shape now. I will clean them up and I will start by making the tail wing a little bit thinner on the belt sander.

So everything that I could have done with the belt sander has been done with the belt sander now but for instance I couldn’t reach these places so I will use some chisels to clean this part up a little bit nicer and then I will start hand sanding to finish it all off.

All the main parts have their final shape now so now it’s time to make the axle, the wing struts and the landing gear. For reasons unknown to mankind this dowel has all these ribs on it. An axle doesn’t really work well with ribs so I’m going to use my drill press as a lathe and try to grind these ribs off of the piece of wood.

After finishing all the parts I did a quick check to see if everything fits nicely together and as you can see this looks like an airplane so it does. What I did for the propeller is I took a screw and I filed away some of the threat so that if the propeller is assembled to the airplane it will be able to rotate.

Before gluing it up and coating I will personalize this gift by burning the name of my niece into the wood. Now it’s time to glue everything together but not exactly. I will glue it up in sub-assemblies and I will explain you why when the glue has dried and that will be tomorrow when I will apply the first layer of varnish.

Welcome back. It’s now the next day and the glue for these sub-assemblies has fully dried so I can start preparing for application of the varnish. The reason that I did not construct the airplane fully yet is that it will make application of varnish a pain in the butt so I will mask off some of the parts where the glue will finally go when fully constructing the airplane and then I can start with coating.

After two coatings of varnish all the parts have a beautiful satin finish so now it’s finally time to assemble the airplane. Before I do that I will remove the steel wire and then mix up some five-minute epoxy and put all the parts together.

I’m so happy with how this thing turned out and had a lot of fun making it. I hope I showed you that you don’t need a lot of fancy tools to make cool stuff like this wooden airplane. If you liked this video please hit the like button and please subscribe to my channel to see more woodworking projects in the future. For now I would like to thank you for watching. Bye, bye!