Tom Stanton’s 3D-Printed Supercapacitor Plane Maximizes Flight Time

Tom Stanton’s latest electric wind-up plane is a better lesson in lightweight design than it is a stunt. The eye-catching part is the airframe itself: instead of treating 3D printing like a way to make chunky plastic parts, Stanton uses printed structure as one layer in a hybrid build, then prints the wings and control surfaces directly onto tissue paper. That one move, plus a single 10 F supercapacitor and a micro motor, is how he turns about 4 seconds of cranking into roughly 45 seconds of flight.

The important comparison is the one Stanton already gave the hobby world in 2023. His earlier supercapacitor plane, shown in a YouTube video posted on December 21, 2023, was a larger RC aircraft built around six supercapacitors in series, aimed at roughly 18 volts. Hackaday’s coverage of that build said it managed just under two minutes in the air and recharged in about the same amount of time. The new version changes the goal entirely: smaller, lighter, and optimized for free flight rather than RC control. That shift matters because it shows the real design constraint is not “can I make it fly,” but “how little mass can I strip out before the whole energy budget collapses?”

The tissue-paper wing is the part worth stealing. Stanton’s process skips the usual bonding step by printing directly onto tissue paper, then using heat and bending to form the final airfoil shape. That is not just clever for the sake of cleverness. It is a practical way to get a very light wing skin without the weight and stiffness penalties that come with thicker plastic, extra adhesive, or more layers than the design actually needs. If you build small aircraft, gliders, or any motion project where every gram hurts, this is the kind of substitution that can unlock a design that looked impossible on paper.

The single-surface wing is not a compromise in this case, it is the point. Hackaday notes that single-surface airfoils are normal in this niche because the drag and weight penalties of a closed wing are not worth the gain. That is the kind of detail people miss when they assume better always means more material. For a tiny free-flight aircraft, a fully enclosed wing can be the wrong answer if it adds weight faster than it adds lift. Stanton’s build leans into that reality instead of fighting it, and that is why the plane can stay in the air on such a small energy store.

The supercapacitor choice teaches the other half of the lesson: energy density is the boss. Stanton found that supercapacitor energy density drops sharply below 10 F, which is why the final build uses a single 10 F capacitor instead of a bigger, more complicated pack. That makes the design brutally honest about what supercaps are good at. They charge and discharge fast, but they do not store energy like batteries, so the airframe has to be built around low mass, low drag, and short bursts of usable power. In practice, that means the plane is not a battery replacement so much as a showcase for what happens when you design around the capacitor’s strengths instead of pretending they are hidden.

That trade-off is exactly why the build is interesting to anyone who prints functional parts. A lot of desktop printing gets wasted on thinking in solid chunks: thicker walls, more infill, stronger brackets, heavier parts. Stanton is doing the opposite. He is treating the printer as a way to place material only where geometry demands it, then adding tissue paper and heat-forming to create a flying skin that would be silly to print in plastic alone. It is a reminder that 3D printing becomes much more powerful when it stops being the whole manufacturing process and starts acting like one stage in a larger fabrication chain.

The broader maker context makes the project feel even less like a one-off trick. Stanton’s Printables profile already includes other shared builds such as a hand crank generator, a compressed air engine, and a vase-mode wing. That matters because it shows the plane sits inside a consistent design philosophy: make it open, make it light, and make the mechanism obvious enough that other builders can learn from it. He is not just posting a pretty prototype. He is documenting a family of low-mass, mechanically legible projects that other makers can adapt.

There is also a reason supercapacitor flight keeps showing up in hobby circles. HackSpace has previously pointed out that supercapacitor-powered free-flight planes are attractive because they avoid some of the weight penalty of batteries. That framing lines up perfectly with Stanton’s latest build. If the mission is a short, self-powered flight from a tiny energy store, then shaving mass becomes more valuable than chasing exotic power density. The plane’s 45-second runtime from 4 seconds of cranking is the proof point: the system is tuned for a brief but satisfying payoff, not endurance.

The transfer lesson for your own projects is straightforward. If you are building aircraft, walkers, mechanical toys, or anything that has to move under its own stored energy, start by asking where the weight is hiding before you ask for more power.

• Use printed parts as structure, not as the entire finished surface, when a lighter skin will do.
• Substitute materials aggressively, like Stanton’s tissue-paper wing skin, when the part only needs shape and tension.
• Match the airframe to the energy store, because a small capacitor or light battery only makes sense if the rest of the build is equally disciplined.
• Treat single-surface geometry as a real option, especially when closed sections add more mass than they return in performance.

Stanton’s plane is easy to mistake for a novelty because it is small, quirky, and powered by a hand crank. That is exactly why it is worth studying. It shows, in a very compact build, how 3D printing can move beyond plastic parts and into serious lightweight fabrication, where material choice and energy storage are part of the same design problem.