Worked on the hovercraft some more yesterday. Got the engine mount figured out ... it's not perfect, but it looks like it'll work pretty well. We also did a little work on the engine cover. It was a moderately productive afternoon, considering we only had a few hours to spend on it. I think in a couple of weeks, we may have this thing hovering again!
Before next weekend I'm going to do some cleanup tasks on it; sanding drips in the paint and rasping off a particularly ugly jigsaw cut we made last night so that the engine cover would fit right. Onward!
Historical note: does anyone want a hovercraft? This fucking thing is still in my garage.
Jess, Claire, and I worked on the hovercraft yesterday. On Friday I added some metal to the motor mount to keep it from sagging in the front, then yesterday we installed the motor to the mount, put the mount on the body, and installed the propeller. It turns out that the sagging motor mount may have been intentional (which would explain all of the hammer marks on it) because with it straightened out, there is some interference between the propeller and the velocity stack. So I'm going to have to pull it off and move the motor mount back about 1/8" to account for that.
We also tackled the "hood" (trunk? motor cover?); it's kind of flimsy and was pretty broken. We put together an aluminum frame for the bottom of it that should make the hinge attachment work and keep the whole thing stiffer and straighter.
The plan right now is to get the motor mount fixed, get the cover fixed and mounted on the body, then I need to work on the motor a bit: electric starter, alternators, kill switch, etc. I guess do something about the driver's seat too. Once it hovers well, the next step will be thrust.
I want to push on this pretty hard in the next few weeks; if it gets to the point where it works reliably, I want to see if I can talk the people at work in to letting me interface the Epoc headset with it so that we have something to show off at work. *that* would generate some interesting discussion with the safety folks ...