So I put up a sort of How to video on the process I did when I made a skirt for my hovercraft. It should be pretty easily for others to replicate based on my techniques in the video. The first water test with the new skirt was very successful. Increasing the skirt pressure a bit did make it run okay across the water. I want to do a full 10 minute run with all the holes open now to compare the results. I noticed the skirt flexes a little more with the lower air pressure. I’m totally afraid that it is going to dig it, and it very well could.
I also hypothesize that part of my problem is that the craft is still too light in some sense for the skirt to press against the ground evenly when the pressure rise up more. Perhaps I will try a run with more weight.
I ran the batteries pretty low on that run as you could see. I had to let up on the thrust to allow more current to be put into the skirt to keep it from filling with water. I run things pretty hard on this run and it was much hotter as a consequence. I feel like the lift motors were working harder than usual because I had to throttle up to get my CFM up for the air escaping the skirt. Part of the problem is the skirt design itself, because of the way that I attached it on the bottom side was incidentally different this time than it was supposed to be because I cut the hole out wrong because distractions. All of this changes once I get the skirt attachment system setup nice. With the extra pressure came higher average current draw, and more heat. By the end of the run, the older of the two batteries looked like this:
Here is a picture of what it looks like normally before a run. It actually returned back to this size..
The pack still balances out!
I also put up this video, which is a day time parking lot run in a fresh parking lot. It seems this month I can’t get a day where there is no wind. Every time there is significant wind when I am out. The wind kicked up as soon as I hit the water above, and the wind was beating the crap out of me in the video below.
