I've wanted to build one of these since i was a kid, about 2 weeks ago a buddy of mine who has a lawn care business dropped off this broken leaf blower. The leaf blower has already been in my shop once before, he broke the pull starter which i fixed, but he runs all his stuff on ethanol gas so the fuel lines were shot. Probably close to 10 years out of a 'consumer grade' 100$ big box store leaf blower, hard to complain.
(FYI if anyone finds one of these hitachi's they are GREAT leaf blowers, definitely worth saving)
I showed my kids a youtube video on how to build the hovercraft and asked them if they would want to do it. They were totally stoked so we took a couple hours and threw it together.
First Lyle measured out the circle using a piece of string. This was some crappy plywood from a crate that i salvaged, since buying real plywood would have increased the cost of this project by infinity %:
Next Dad cut out the circle, and another smaller circle for the bottom:
Next Lyle and Sid picked through the random leftover house paint and came up with this 'Eddie van halen' masking tape design using white, red, and black swizzles:
While the paint was drying Lyle replaced the fuel lines on the leaf blower. Its always fun fixing these with the kids since it only takes about 5-10 minutes to get them running. I keep a pretty good supply of spare parts on hand, so i had the right fuel lines, filter, and carb diaphragm.
The next few steps, Dad had both hands pretty busy. We cut a circle out of 6 mil poly sheeting about 4" bigger all the way around the board. We drilled a hole for the leaf blower inlet. I had upgraded the sewer hose on my camper this summer and the old one had a perfect connector so i put some wood screws to hold it into the leaf blower and screwed the leaf blower down to the board with more wood screws. I hole saw'd a hole in the board and it was the perfect size to jam the hose in there.
The plastic got some vents cut around the middle and reinforced with duct tape, and the other wood disc got used to hold the plastic up to make the skirt. Finally we stapled the plastic skirt all around the perimeter and used some more duct tape just to seal things up.
The final product came out great, works exactly as intended but its a little tricky to balance, and its very loud. Definitely need ear protection, and probably will add some kind of seat. Safety glasses aren't a bad idea either since dust and sand are blowing up around you when you ride it.
It really doesn't work well on the rough asphalt driveway. I have a concrete skirt thats about 40' x 20' off the front of the shop they can scoot around on, but ideally we need to find an empty parking lot with fresh pavement.
If anyone is actually interested in building one, i can link the video i used. I looked at a few and combined the ideas, plus used junk i had laying around. The total cost for the project was $0 and the total build time was under 3 hours with the kids doing most of the work. If i was going to just build it for them i probably could have done it in less than an hour.
(FYI if anyone finds one of these hitachi's they are GREAT leaf blowers, definitely worth saving)
I showed my kids a youtube video on how to build the hovercraft and asked them if they would want to do it. They were totally stoked so we took a couple hours and threw it together.
First Lyle measured out the circle using a piece of string. This was some crappy plywood from a crate that i salvaged, since buying real plywood would have increased the cost of this project by infinity %:
Next Dad cut out the circle, and another smaller circle for the bottom:
Next Lyle and Sid picked through the random leftover house paint and came up with this 'Eddie van halen' masking tape design using white, red, and black swizzles:
While the paint was drying Lyle replaced the fuel lines on the leaf blower. Its always fun fixing these with the kids since it only takes about 5-10 minutes to get them running. I keep a pretty good supply of spare parts on hand, so i had the right fuel lines, filter, and carb diaphragm.
The next few steps, Dad had both hands pretty busy. We cut a circle out of 6 mil poly sheeting about 4" bigger all the way around the board. We drilled a hole for the leaf blower inlet. I had upgraded the sewer hose on my camper this summer and the old one had a perfect connector so i put some wood screws to hold it into the leaf blower and screwed the leaf blower down to the board with more wood screws. I hole saw'd a hole in the board and it was the perfect size to jam the hose in there.
The plastic got some vents cut around the middle and reinforced with duct tape, and the other wood disc got used to hold the plastic up to make the skirt. Finally we stapled the plastic skirt all around the perimeter and used some more duct tape just to seal things up.
The final product came out great, works exactly as intended but its a little tricky to balance, and its very loud. Definitely need ear protection, and probably will add some kind of seat. Safety glasses aren't a bad idea either since dust and sand are blowing up around you when you ride it.
It really doesn't work well on the rough asphalt driveway. I have a concrete skirt thats about 40' x 20' off the front of the shop they can scoot around on, but ideally we need to find an empty parking lot with fresh pavement.
If anyone is actually interested in building one, i can link the video i used. I looked at a few and combined the ideas, plus used junk i had laying around. The total cost for the project was $0 and the total build time was under 3 hours with the kids doing most of the work. If i was going to just build it for them i probably could have done it in less than an hour.