Roughly fifty plus years ago when I was just a kid in school I enjoyed playing with a toy that no longer is on the market. This was a three bladed boomerang produced by Ohio Arts. I am not sure if the company even exists today but I do remember the toy very well and thought that it would be great if I could find one. I went online to see what I could find. I only came across a couple of postings about the toy. One was an article about it and the comment that one had sold on Ebay for $200. I then found the toy on a site called Etsy. Here the seller also wanted $200. I remember this toy only costing me a couple of dollars. No way am I going to pay that kind of money and I knew that I could make it maybe even as less as what I paid for it as a kid. Another project presented itself once again.
The photo above shows what I had recently come across on Etsy. This was called the HiYo boomerang. It flew like a regular boomerang and I remember that you needed a good sized baseball field to fly it. It was a lot of fun but there is no way that I would want to pay more than a few dollars for one even today.
I did remember that the original boomerang wings had an airfoil shape like what is on an airplane and with the information that I had gleaned from the Etsy site found out the dimensions of the wings as well. It was at least a start. I did a little more research online to find a suitable airfoil shape. The diagram above gives you just an inkling of the different types of airfoils shapes that are used in aircraft. The bottom shape called the Actual Clark Y was what I was looking for.
As I usually do I started my design work using Fusion 360 CAD software. The image above is what I came up with. I knew that the distance of the original boomerang from tip to top was 12.5 inches. Again this was valuable info as it made laying out the new design much easier to work out. I took the original boomerang photo from Etsy and scaled it to the 12.5 inch tip to tip size. From there I copied the airfoil shape on the tip of the layout and again near the center of the new boomerang design. After this was completed I simply lofted the airfoil sketches to form one of the wings. I knew at this point that the shape of the wing looked good.
Next I took the first wing shape and made a circular pattern around the center axis of my computer model. This gave me the three wings I needed for the toy. After some cleanup of the model to get the nice smooth shape where the three wings overlapped I combined all three parts into one body or component. I decided to make a recessed triangular area in the middle of the toy and insert an additional triangular part with a star cut out in the middle just to give it a little Tinker's Workshop style.
Here is how the finished boomerang looks this morning after 3D printing, sanding, and painting was completed. This is actually the second test model. The first model I 3D printed worked right out of the box on the first throw. The only trouble was that my back yard was nowhere near big enough to fly the first test model. (My mistake.) With the first throw I made the boomerang immediate made a 180 degree turn, flew over my garage and to this day I still have not found it. Luckily I did not 3D print the first test model full scale. That boomerang along with this latest one is only half scale being eight inches in diameter. It was much quicker to make it this size and if it failed would be easier to try and correct any design flaws to make another test boomerang.
My 3D printer will be able to make the full sized version which will be sixteen inches in diameter if and when I find that the second test model flies as well if not better than the first test version did. I will test the second model out in the next couple of weeks when the weather starts to warm up a bit and I can get to a baseball field that is near my home. (Seven below zero out today....ouch!) At least there I can give it a good throw and still be able to see where it lands so I don't loose this boomerang like I did with the first one. If it all works out I will then 3D print the full sized version that takes over nine hours to 3D print. I'll let you know how it all turns out. Have a good one!
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