DIY: Simple Hovercraft

A hovercraft, also known as an air-cushion vehicle or ACV, is a craft capable of traveling over land, water, mud, ice, and other surfaces.

Hovercraft has an inflatable tube(called skirt) below it(as in the second image). It is filled with air which eliminates contact in between ground and body. Hovercraft travels on an air cushion. It has very low resistance in between surface and vehicles it does not has any significant contact. So it can achieve very good speed using lower power.

In actual hovercraft there is one blower which pushes air to skirt and set of propeller pushes hovercraft to forward. but in our hovercraft, we are using just one fan to blow our cushion and also push forward.

In this video, we are making a simple and easy built hovercraft. You can go through video of the complete making of it.

image source:
image 2: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffon_Hoverwork
image 3: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hovercraft...

We will need following stuff to make hovercraft:

• coreless DC motor with the propeller (of 2-4 cm works best)
• 300-600 mah 1s Lipo battery

Both of above item can be purchased from eBay or you can also harvest it from old RC helicopter or quadcopter.

• cardboard
• adhesive tape
• A small piece of plastic sheet

Here our main body is made of cardboard with the size of 15cm*10cm with a rounded corner with a radius of 2.5cm.

from 2/3 length distance of length, the air inlet is made.

all these dimensions are just to have an idea of overall scale.

The skirt is most important part of hovercraft as it creates a cushion of air which lifts hovercraft and eliminates contact frictions.

• Firstly place that body which you have cut in the last step and place it on the plastic sheet take the offset of around 1-1.5cm and cut off extra plastic. (refer image 1 and 2)
• Then cover bottom face of the body with the same plastic sheet and stick it using take on the upper side. (refer attached video )
• Now again come to lower side and take an offset to the inner side of around 2cm and cut rest od the plastic.

• Take an inverted V-shaped piece of cardboard and stick it to the body of hovercraft. using glue and/or tape.then attach the motor to this mount.
• Now air inlet is open from sides that need to be fixed. so take some pieces of cardboard and cover it.

here you need to take care that propeller should not touch any part of the body of hovercraft.

now our hovercraft is almost ready.

Now stick battery to back end of hovercraft. as we are pushing air to the back end of hovercraft, there is more leakage from skirt at the back so the weight of battery balances it.

Stick a piece of hard paper just after propeller which acts as a rudder.

Use rudder to balance our hovercraft. without balancing hovercraft would just rotate at a single position. so only properly balance hovercraft only can travel strength and fast.

Connect the motor to the battery such that propeller pushes air to backward.

so if hovercraft tends to rotate in clockwise direction move rudder to left and vice versa to balance it.

and most importantly,

"...HAVE A FUNN..."