With some help from Michael today I made good progress on the rest of the skirts.
We started cutting out out sections for the front and rear of the vehicle. They're slightly deeper so go across the half way point so we couldn't put them side by side.
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| Practice skirt over new material for front and back. |
Attaching the skirts makes it look a lot more like a real hovercraft.
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| Outer edges of skirts attached |
We moved on to attaching the inner edge of the skirt in the front.
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| Inside of first skirt attached. |
Punching the holes on the underside is a pain. So we switched the order and lined up and punched the holes first on top, before moving to the underside.
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| All the holes punched and validated |
While working on it the screws would pop off easily as we were working on it so I switched to using zip ties for guidance.
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| Using zip ties for guidance. |
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| Cable ties down the port side skirt. |
The small spacing between the batton straps and the rub rails made the prepunching even more important since visibility is limited. And being under-hung it's hard to hold everything in place simultaneously.
There's also important aspects to how to overlap the skirt parts. By switching the overlap we were able to make it so it will slide better over the ground without getting hooked.
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| After with lip facing backwards |
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| Before with lip facing forward |
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We trimmed some of the corners off to make the joint more rounded, but it's definitely going to be pretty ugly at the corners. But hopefully it will float high enough so that it will not matter too much. I know it's not going to deal with plow in well anyway. We glued it in a moderately curved manner. The heavier skirt material is harder to bend and secure in the billowed shape.
Here's the first results. It looks like it will hold the air. We'll have to see how it looks once it's inflated.
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| First corner glued |
Later in the afternoon I had a little bit more time so I attached the aft and port skirt inside edges. And now it's starting to take shape. Just some more gluing to do.
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| Looking underneath with the skirts mostly attached. |
