For the last few months I’ve been taking the stairs a couple of times a day to get away from my desk. We have 13 floors in my building so it gets the old heart pumping. A few weeks ago I started walking up and down with a couple of other people.
I’ve also got a daily calender that you make paper airplanes out of. One of them was a paper helicopter. Some how we got the idea to try dropping it down the stairs to see how far it would go. The area between the stairwells is about six inches, so the original one would bounce off the handrails and go down a floor or two. Every once and awhile we could get one to drop four or five floors. One of us was able, once, to get one to drop 11 floors.
For the last week I’ve been trying to get a better model made. I’ve tried lots of different ideas, strange rotor patterns, big ones, little ones, but none of them really worked well. The bigger ones wouldn’t get much spin, but when they hit a railing sometimes they would bounce just right and keep going. The smaller ones worked a bit better, but any little wind would knock them around, and if they hit something that was it.
I started using a heavier stock paper, that worked better, but still not great. Then I learned that we still had some mylar that was just sitting around. I finally got one that works really well. It’s small, but with a paper clip added it spins really quick and doesn’t wander as much. Twice now I’ve gotten it to go 12 floors. The next step is one of our other buildings that has 19 floors to it.
So if you like walking the stairs and you have a nice gap have some fun and drop some paper helicopters.
