Making a Boomerang

Since I was young I've always wondered about how a boomerang worked but I never thought to look into actually making my own. My wondering was short lived and I was distracted enough by the next shiny object to never actually look into the "how". Recently, however, I was looking for the next cool project to try and thought hmmm... boomerang. Well, long story short, I found a website called dangerouslyfun.com who had easy to follow plans for boomerangs. So, I followed them. :-) It's actually pretty simple to do if you don't get into the engineering of making it perfect. I tried it a couple of times at the park and was happy enough to see it curve back towards me. I made a few more changes to try to get it to curve closer back to me. (I plan to test that out really soon).

At any rate, I followed pretty closely to the website with the exception of the airfoil not being as nice as the one shown (but that's due to impatience). Dangerouslyfun.com did such a good job in explaining and showing the tutorial of it all that I don't think I can do any better of a job, so I'm just going to share my pictures. :-)

Just a small note: I bought the wood at Michaels and seem to be able to get at least two boomerangs out of it and I used my scroll saw to cut it to shape before using an power sander to sand the airfoils down.



I'm hoping to test this out and take a video of the throws. Once I have one, I'll try to post it.

Good Luck in making your own boomerang, and do be careful as they do tend to come back after thrown -- don't forget to duck! ;-)

[Update: 6-7-09] I tried it out and it comes back -- for the most part. There seems to be a bit of a learning curve to get it to come back fully. Anyway, I tried to capture a video of the throws but I kept losing the boomerang on my camera (small digital cameras don't work very well when you're trying to track a small light colored boomerang in the sky). Oh well.