It’s been quite a long journe that finally drove us to the construction of our hot air balloon model. First we learn some facts about how hot air balloons where invented. Then we learned if hot air balloons fly and how to steer them. We visited Ultra Magic, a very important hot air balloon factory. We where really surprised by many facts but what it really surprised us it was how manual the process is.

The design of our first model it was from 3D figures we had to design how to build them from a paper. So we had to think a lot in order to get the drawing done. Later, we cutted out the outline and glued the model. After this process we started building a scaled envelope with real fabric from an actual hot air balloon. Ultra Magic provided us this fabric. We scaled the model 1:3 so the final envelope was three times bigger than the first prototype.

We have learned how to scale, how to design in 2D a 3D model and to solve problems along the way such as finding out silicone wasn’t suitable to stick the hot air balloon fabric. We had tons of fun!