Air Cars

[7br]

For years in my youth, I would read Boy's Life and check out the xray glasses and and vacuum cleaner powered aircar classified. Well, the vacuum cleaner bit the dust and the kids want to try to build the aircar. Anyone ever try building one?

[Bret4207]

If you ride around in the dark, dark part of the night time, you'll eventually tune into a guy named Art Bell. Art has a coast to coast radio program that caters to the "black helicopter" crowd, JFK conspiracy theorists, left over hippies, and people who stay up all night because they WANT to. He had a guy on there a few months back who claims to have a working flying car. He just needs the same thing he needed 25 years ago when I first heard him on the radio- $$$$$$$.

Do a google search on flying car and you'll find a bunch of stuff.

[Buckshot]

...............You mean like a hovercraft?

..............Buckshot

[Nazgul]

Rode a vacuum powered hover board in High School at a science demo buy a major chemical company. About 37 years ago. Very simple device with little practical application.

[7br]

It is more like a hovercraft. Practicallity be damned. I drop enough money chasing bambi to buy a couple sides of beef. One big problem is storing the bugger after building it. The website is

http://www.hovercraft-aircar.com/


Not looking to be one of the black helicopter crowd. I thought it looked cool as a kid and my kids still think it does.

[Bret4207]

Soup that baby up with a shop vac motor and then you got something!

[fourarmed]

Mark,

http://www.amasci.com/amateur/hovercft.html

[Frank46]

The mythbusters did something similar some time back. One guy used three leaf blowers . Frank

[Buckshot]

.................Junkyard Wars had an episode building hovercraft. Actually both were successfull but one hadn't been completely de-bugged and the other was phenomenal until they broke it :-)

The deck has to be light but rigid and the skirt has to be stiff, but at the same time flexible enough to follow small irregularities in the surface you're traversing. One was built with a piece of plywood as the deck, with stiffeners on top. The other was built using a sheet of styrofoam as the deck.

There was no legitimate skirting planted in the junkyard for them to use but there was several kinds of suitable stuff. Both teams did quite a bit of stitching, sewing and glueing to fabricate thier skirts.

I recall one team fabricated a simple snail plenum similar to a swamp cooler blower assembly. Both were gasoline powered. It isn't PSI you're after but delivery of a large volumn of air. I believe they both used chainsaw type auxilary engines driving props for forward propulsion. Very similar to the Everglades swamp boats.

One team had problems with the skirt coming loose in places around the perimiter. Other then that it would have worked well. The best one finally died due to digging in a corner of the platform in a turn. Due to rapid simple construction they had problems with the outside edge tipping down on the outside of corners. The inside would lift and the air would escape.

....................Buckshot