How to build your own hovercraft: The DIY Hovercraft Project…
Like your RCs? Then you will most definitely like this, according to the project, this was done on a tight budget and the only money spent was on the propellers and the batteries, of course, you will need the materials to do it if you haven’t already got them in your shed or something. As you will see in the video, it works pretty well and looks to be great indoor and outdoor fun!
The workings of a hovercraft are fairly straightforward: one high-power motor with an airplane propeller forces air down through the hole in the center, which pushes the bottom of the hovercraft off the ground. This greatly reduces friction, allowing the hovercraft to scoot around without much trouble. It also makes it much more difficult to control, however: when the hovercraft turns, it will keep traveling in a straight line unless more thrust is applied. Since we are used to controlling cars or boats, the newtonian behavior of a hovercraft is challenging indeed. The body of the hovercraft is made out of styrofoam, cut with a saw and sanded to smooth the edges. The skirt on the bottom is made out of pieces of a plastic GAP bag, attached with Scotch tape and hot glue. The radio control unit was scavenged from an old boat I had, along with the drive motor mounted on the wooden supports, while the lifting motor was from my physics teacher. The battery is 300 mAh 6V NiMH (or NiCd, I forget), and I have a pair of them. They were about $6-$10 each (again, forgot) and about $12 for the 2 1/2 hour charger. The servomotor for steering was from an old RC car I had, but I unfortunately wasn’t able to find the radio unit or else I would’ve used that instead. I needed the gears in the thing so it could provide enough torque, however.
Probably the single most useful thing during construction was hot glue - the entire thing is held together with the stuff and it will hold for some time to come. The physical construction of the hovercraft was really the easy part… the hard part was trying to get it to work the way I wanted it to.
[via Project Hovercraft]
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