Superstructure Round 1

Again thanks to Christian for helping out. We've made great progress and the extra hands were very helpful. This time we assembled the stock cut into the first semblance of the superstructure of the craft.

The stock is an unlikely 1.5x1.5" redwood. (Home Depot's selection was less than ideal, but the redwood should work well, and looks quite nice.)

The planning sketches I drew up

To get started I put together a sketch. Here's the version we started with inside. After going out the expected 12" height of the fan was measured to be 10" and the outside radius was 26" so the cross members were extended by 2" and the verticals shortened by 2".
 
Here's the timelapse of our work.



And the result:

The superstructure placed on the hull. It's not exactly in place as the hull's upside down at the moment, the skirt strips are on the bottom.

There was one complication that the engine mount for the vertical shaft has 3 bolt holes on an recessed circular pattern. The pair of boards going across will not work. We will need to find a more complex solution.

Remainder of matching skirt strips created and superstructure rough cutting

With more help from Christian I've been making great progress. We successfully create all the remaining skirt strips matching pieces.

We made much faster progress by using a small template piece, pictured below. This allowed us to not worry about the lateral alignment and simply make sure it lined up along the length of the strip. All the matching strips are paired to match a particular strip on the hovercraft to match their specific idosyncracities. (aks hand drilling inaccuracies.)

An example of the template for marking the mating strips.

Here's the time-lapse of this stage.


You'll see at the end we also started cutting the stock for the superstructure.

Skirt Strip Matching Strips

Christian and I made the first two matching strips for the skirt attachments.

This involved cutting them to length, followed by carefully marking out and drilling the clearance holes. We first drilled with 3/16th, but due to imprecisions using hand tools we found 1/4" holes were much more likely to line up.

Here's the time-lapse of our work. 



Then end result looks pretty good. I'll need to get some more approximately 5/8" screws.  

The 5/8" screws next to the attached skirt.

The corner with both matching skirt strips in place.