| Step One: | |
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Disassemble your vacuum down to the motor, fan, any necessary housings. Skip this section (obviously) if you are choosing to dual-purpose a leaf blower. Hmm, a gas-powered backpack blower with a stand up hover platform might push the excitement level into the visible smile range for my stoic child. I damn sure wouldn’t ride it. At left is my donor vacuum. |
| As seen in these shots of partial disassembly the vacuum pathing is/was woefully inefficient; up and down, up and down with hard plastic flap-type seals and generally unimpressive construction: | |
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| The finished blower is shown below with the hose attached to a modified section of the outflow filter housing. The housing was quite irregular shaped so I removed all unnecessary material with a rotary cutter and then made a duct using a thick poly bag I had laying about. | |
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| Step 2: | |
| Prepping the platform. I went with a rectangular platform due to no other reason than that it was that shape when I dug it out of my lumber pile. Hindsight tells me that a round platform would likely be better for airflow than my rectangle was.
Somewhere in the general vicinity of the center of the platform a hole must be drilled to accept |
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A shot of my platform. The corners have been rounded off to help prevent tearing the skirt. The roll of material seen on the platform is some leftover weather stripping I used to seal up the skirt/staple/platform joint. Definite overkill, just use duct tape or something similar. |
| The finished platform with a decent view of the inlet port and the stapled and sealed skirt which, incidentally, is an old shower curtain: | |
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Continue reading DIY Hovercraft – Part 2