Thrust engine mounted

With a few more fittings and help from both Christian and Tudor the thrust engine is now mounted and awaiting it's first test tomorrow.

The morning started out with a bit of a setback though. I tried testing our reinforced handles, and the results were a complete failure. Lifting on the handle just tore a handle base plate sized chunk out of the side of the hovercraft.

The results of testing the lift handle.

As a result of this we decided to choose a new handle style, with a larger mounting plate. We found some pull plate handles from commercial doors which seemed to fit the bill and could take advantage of the reinforcement plate we had already installed. (with a little trimming)

After a quick trip for the new handles and some more fittings we replaced the handles and worked toward mounting the engine:




In the video you can see with the screws removed from the rest of the handles, I was able to just pull them off.

After a bit of a break we were able to get the fan and propeller ready to run.



With the fan prepped we focused in on the engine mount.

We significantly improved it by switching to use brackets with a diagnoal piece instead of just the one piece of bent sheet metal.




The oak board for mounting the engine worked way better than I thought. it's quite solid, but still easy to work with.

There were some worries about impingement between the mounting brackets and the through bolts holding the engine mount board to the assembly, because the engine mount needed to be moved to Bthe rear to accomadate the distance to the fan housing. but we were able to get enough spacing to not worry about too little leverage. And really 1 bolt on each side would actually be enough.

The other compromise we found was to add a diagonal brace to the engine mount for lateral stiffness. i had been planning on a full width piece of plywood for the front of the engine mount, but we changed it up to just a diagnoal stringer to allow for increased airflow.

And finally with the engine mounted we mounted the propeller and closed up the fan housing.



At the end you can see us working on filling in the rudder design.

The thrust engine, fan housing and propeller final assembly from the front.

The thrust engine, fan housing and propeller final assembly from the behind

A fun note, this was a 4 gopro battery day. It's great to have easily exchangeable batteries. Otherwise you would have missed a lot of this.

In the course of this day we made a lot of incremental progress and refinements. The fan housing was assembled and disassembled many times. It's frustrating but worth iterating as we see improvements.

It's going to be fun to test the engine tomorrow. We made sure that the collet and propeller mounting is very well secured as we learned is necessary for the lift fan.