I've been hoping to reinforce the corners with fiberglass. On Saturday I attemped to warm up the garage above the minimum 55 degrees necessary for the epoxy to cure. It was just below 55 degrees so I opened the garage door hoping the afternoon sun would warm things up. At which point it clouded over and that plan didn't go anywhere.
As such I did some research and looked around for some other techniques for heating the garage. There are quite a few options that Home Depot advertises however most of them are not available anywhere nearby. And even better is when you get to Home Depot, no one knows where they would be. They don't seem to carry the more classic horizontal tube like heaters anymore. And I found one high capacity one finally, in the "light cloud". The "light cloud" is the section of the store where they have all the sample lights??
After way too long at the store I got it home and fired it up. It's rated for up to 1350 square feet, so it warmed up the garage quite quickly.
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| The heater warming up the garage with the fan next to it to circulate the heat better. |
I took apart the thrust engine kill switch, but realized I needed some more connectors to connect the kill switch properly, so paused that.
The lift engine cowling had been rotating while I was testing so I pinned it from each side using just some wood screws. I would like to beef it up with 1/4-20 bolts in the future, but didn't want to disassemble the lift engine just to secure it. I'll try to remember to do that next time it's open.
The rudders are very heavy so I'm planning to take the wood and remove most of the interior material and then just cover the outside with cloth. I haven't decided if it should be plastic, skirt material or fiberglass. I'll leave the perimeter from the existing board to be the main structure, as well as a lattice of the original boards to take the main load.
One other bit of tuning for the rudders is to find a spacer washer to give it less backlash in the controls. They are passing over a 1/4-20 bolt as a pin, but the hole is at least 1/4" clearance giving I estimate a 16th of an inch of backlash, which is a lot for a 2" throw overall.
Here's my first timelapse.
I had to take a break and get some more supplies.
Coming back several hours later, everything was cold again. In the 15-30 minutes I ran the heater I got the ceiling up to 70 degrees, while the hovercraft body got to close to 60 degrees. The floor remained approximately 53 degrees. I was hoping that the heat would remain longer and I would not need to keep heating while the epoxy cures.
While at the store I also found some end caps for the throttle leavers to make them a little bit safer.
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| End caps for the throttles |
And I finished up by getting the thrust kill switch wired up. Though I didn't test it due to it being late at night.
Here's the timelapse of part two.
