Margin of Air: Cleaning up bottom

I finally bit the bullet and decided to take the skirt off and fix up the bottom of the hovercraft.

I'll also use this time to change the skirts from the plastic drop cloth to the proper rubber surfaces. I still have some experimentation but I found that the plastic had failed in several places already.

Tears in the front port interior corner. These were clearly from rubbing back on the skid bars.

Tears in the front starboard interior corner.

A little bit of the wear and tear can be seen on the skirts here. With roughing going on down the sides.

Here's a full timelapse of removing the skirt.

I also made some interesting discoveries inside the bag. With non-trivial amounts of dirt of non-trivial size. I guess the smaller stuff blew out at some point.

There was also a surprising amount of dirt inside the skirt

After removing the skirt my next step is to clean up and seal the bottom of the hull. The top of the hull has been fiberglass reinfored at the joints but not the bottom yet. This is both putting the full load on the foam, as well as providing surfaces for water intrusion.

So with a bunch of help from Jenny I've tipped the hovercraft up on it's side. Here's a video it was a good anount of effort.

Here's the final result

Here it is resting on the fan housing, it makes a nice roll bar...

And the bottom you can see the blemishes clearly in the streaking sunlight.

There's a bunch of work to do down here. For example the corners especially the front and rear need some reinforcing.

And one of the skid boards, is only attached in the front half.

I can fit my whole finger behind the skid board.

However the skid boards appear to be doing their job well. There was no noticable damage to the skirt attachments and there was clearly some wear and tear on the skid boards themselves.

An example of the wear on the skid boards up close.

Here's some closeups of the joints that need reinforcement. Clearly glue on foam w/o vacuum application doesn't really work too well. I'll make up for it with some good fiber/epoxy corners.