January 21st, 2010 in Projects.
Thought one: Several years ago, Mike P and I built our hovercraft out of simple materials we had around. We powered it with a leaf blower at first, then tried to install my 22″ propeller (you can see the hole cut for it in the pics) but it couldn’t hold the pressure required. The leaf blower kinda worked, but we certainly couldn’t get both of us on it. A little math tells us that 0.3 psi in the skirt of a 3′x4′ hovercraft will hold 500lbs - about the range I want. But how do we get that volume?
Thought two: A lot of people at home build jet engines using turbochargers from cars: the primary builds 3-8psi in the combustion chamber, which rockets the gas out the exhaust turbine, spinning it faster and stuffing more in, etc etc. These guys hardly produce much forward thrust, BUT they push a very impressive volume of air of at least 1 psi.What can we do with that?
Exactly! Put them together! I’m going to build the only jet hovercraft that I know of. As long as I can get it floating nicely, I have a 24″ prop and motor I can use for forward propulsion also.