How to make a parachute from nylon

Parachutes are very useful things to have lying around in the RC hobby. There's no telling when one might come in useful for a certain project.

There's a whole bunch of tutorials out there showing how to make a parachute. Often they're quite complicated or use things like plastic bags as the primary material. Although this is completely fine if you want to make a parachute for next to nothing and don't mind that it breaks after a few flights, I think there must be a better alternative. Modern full-size parachutes are often made from nylon, a very strong synthetic fibre, so I went along to the local fabric store and bought myself a couple of meters of it. Here's how to turn some into an awesome parachute.

What you'll need

First off, you'll need a workspace to make the parachute. Get yourself a nice flat table and stick a cutting mat down on it. You can pick up one of these and several other useful build tools in our FT Crafty Kit.

Secondly, you'll obviously need some sort of material. I bought 6 square meters of this bright orange nylon for around £6 ($8) here in the UK.

For the strings, I used some sort of relatively thick fishing wire. I up picked a reel from an independent craft shop for £1.50 ($1.80).

Tools for this quick build include scissors, a craft knife, Duct Tape, a ruler and a pencil.

How to make it

Start by cutting out a square. This should be 24" x 24", although you can, of course, vary this for your needs. A 24" parachute is great for most RC applications.

Next, fold the square into quarters. The fabric should now measure 12" across.

Once you've folded the material into quarters, make a note of where the loose ends are. In this image (below) the loose ends are at the bottom right. This is important for the next step which is to place your ruler 4" in from the left side and to cut a triangle from the larger triangle.

When unfolded into the quartered squares, you should see a square chunk missing.

Further unfolding the material, you should now see that you have a square with four chucks missing at each corner. Hooray! You've done it right.

Next, you need to connect the corners. Do this with some small Duct Tape squares.

Simply bring the ends together and join them with the tape on the inside.

After doing this to each corner, you should end up with something like this. Your canopy is pretty much done!

After this, it's time to focus on the wires. All you're going to need is two 33" lines. Each end of these is attached to each corner of the canopy.

To do this securely, first, attach a strip of tape to the end of the wire, but leave about an inch spare.

Next, stick it on top of the tape holding a corner together on the inside of the parachute. Once you've done this, fold the extruding end back on itself and secure with another piece of tape. This makes it far less likely to be pulled through and detach.

From the outside, it should look like this (pictured below). Repeat this with each of the other three wires.

All that's left to do is to find the midpoints of the wires to tape them together. Taping them together is a good idea as it means tangled strings can be unravelled easily in the future. Leave yourself a hoop to connect to whatever you want to drop with the parachute.

To fold the whole thing up, first pinch the very top of the canopy and bring together the rest equally. Fold this over itself and remove trapped air by squashing it down.