World's Smallest Jet-Powered Hovercraft!

this is my jet powered hovercraft it uses a real working jet engine and I've built it to be actually drivable you can climb aboard Power It Up and Jet off at some bottom clenching speeds so today you'll see how I converted the electric hovercraft I made last month to jet power while getting into grips with the new controls and learning how to drive it around without dying then you'll see how my friend Matt and I put the hovercraft to the test to see just how fast they would go completely unrestricted when I gave it 100 throttle on a big open beach you'll also see some frustration improvisation and things not entirely going to plan now I know what you're thinking yes this is the same engine that I used on my RC jet car a few months ago yep it's still working Believe It or Not despite having crashed a couple of times now this here is a real working jet engine and it's completely different to this an electric ducted fan which I've used a few of on my hovercraft as the lift Motors this on the other hand burns real jet fuel and can push things along very very quickly indeed okay so great I can just slap this thing on my hovercraft and it'll be good to go right well no and that's because as with most of my engineering challenges it wouldn't be quite that simple my previous design of this hovercraft used electric motors with steerable Rudders but now without those I'd have to come up with a whole new steering arrangement to make the most out of this jet engine but before I could focus on that I had to fix a few other things with the hovercraft first the first problem was that my skirt on the hovercraft had seen better days after some shall we say thorough testing the last time out oh no it hasn't really enjoyed coming to a grinding halt on the abrasive concrete so I'd have to do some repairs it had fully ripped away from the taped joint so I realized that I'd need to make this stronger so it would be more reliable problem number two was with the winter weather Now setting in I'd need this thing to be much more weather resistant so I waterproof the foam board with a spray sealer Link in the description for stuff I've used on this project by the way and painted the cockpits and with the addition of some Racing Stripes it really started to come together and look pretty clean if I do say so now it was time to solve the problem of how I would steer the hovercraft using the jet engine and yes this solution would involve quite a lot of 3D printing I realized instead of pivoting a Rudder behind the engine I could delete the problem and just pivot the entire engine instead making use of some bearings squeezed into some 3D printed parts that were quickly drawn up on my CAD software next these could be bolted securely to the 3D printed mounts attached to the engine now I know what you're going to be thinking here yes these are plastic and yes the jet engine does get pretty hot but don't worry I put this to the test on my jet car and 3D printed parts are totally fine for this application they just have a tendency to break in a crash [Applause] next I bolted the bearing assembly to some aluminum extrusions and mounted this to the deck of the hovercraft before finally adding a Servo right so we've got the engine mounted with its steering servo all installed I've set up all of the electronics and the fuel tank fuel pump all of that stuff I've added the data terminal onto the dashboard I'm going to be controlling everything with my RC controller this time right now it's time for the first test I fired up the engine and decided perhaps it was a good idea to firstly control it from a distinctly third person perspective that being with me safely not actually on board to the hovercraft at this point Okay who wants to see some hovercraft drifting foreign seemed to work really well so naturally I next climbed the board and throttled it up unfortunately though the ground wasn't very level and it was difficult to predict where the thing was going to go as it generally just followed the uneven Contours of this car park as it was going dark I only had time for one run but the next day I climbed back into the cockpit and did some more testing over the fresh snow foreign with only the very terrain being an issue I'm going to try and go a bit faster now but I have a feeling that I'm going to need to find a flatter and more open area to test in if I want to really get up to some high speeds right I'm just gonna go down here as fast as I can unfortunately again the sloping surface caught me out and I started veering towards the parked car so I decided to cut the lift fans and promptly fell out clearly I need to find a better place to test this thing in luckily I have a place in mind so I set off to find a more suitable test site for the hovercraft to see what it could really do with this jet engine I decided that a beach would make for an ideal location to test the hovercraft out this one was super flat very long and not very busy seagulls being the only Spectators first job is fueling the hovercraft up then we'll power on the electronics and yeah fire the Beast up what are the potential risks would you say as you can see I'm not really wearing any fireproof overalls so if there's a bit of a fuel spillage and then Flames then I might be in trouble don't film this bit Matt this is too late all those batteries as well it's next to it fuel lithium batteries what could go wrong the weather was absolutely perfect and conditions were really exactly what we needed now all I had to do was climb aboard and hope that no issues with the hovercraft would spoil the fun [Music] foreign not quite sure it just didn't seem to be feeding all of the fuel then for some strange reason although it did work flawlessly on a static run just the day before the jet engine was refusing to start which was rather confusing time to do some problem solving firstly I tried changing the battery which Powers the spark plugs inside the engine okay oh no but it didn't work I knew it was too good to be true Matt then we thought it could be a fuel flow issue with the filters so we tried changing these but still the engine kept cutting out around 5000 RPMs below idle speed [Music] it was ramping up I don't get it finally we resorted to Extreme Measures so explain what we're trying we think that the reason that the engine's not firing up is potentially to do with the viscosity of the fuel because it's very cold out at the moment so what we're going to do is just pop boil it well almost pretty much boiling water in here and then stand the fuel tank in it using the boiling water we brought for our Cups of Tea and using it to warm up our fuel for context it was about -1 degree celsius on the beach and the fuel had been kept in a very cold van overnight the most richest solution definitely not going to work if it does yeah you're right this will be the best way of solving a problem ever basically with tea yeah are trying it's better it's better we managed to get more revs out of the engine after this and it looks more and more promising until suddenly [Music] okay look where we got it going okay I'm gonna go to it keep rolling I wasn't going to waste this opportunity so I thought I should probably just throw caution to the wind and see what this thing can really do foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] as I accelerated back down the beach I realized that I'd left it too late to slow down and I was fast approaching a large and uneven stream thus I didn't really want to cross at full speed I instinctively cut the throttle but this would turn out to be a big mistake thank you oh [Music] my God oh my my transmission's a bit wet that was uh quite the spectacular first run I didn't quite intend for to go that fast and then out of nowhere on my return journey I killed the engine and then completely forgot that I was wasn't supposed to uh do that because then I had no steering Authority and I started rotating yeah I ended up uh going straight towards the scene of the accident would say how do I look a bit wet I'm gonna get hypothermic well that's scary whilst you're actually terrifying yeah especially going out of control to be honest it was pretty scary from where I was foreign thankfully aside from being soaked through I was completely fine remarkably there wasn't actually much damage but sadly my transmitter didn't make it well I'm still alive just about that beach was rather ideal for doing that sort of project so maybe you'd like to see me do more speed related projects at that location if you want to help me build some bigger and better projects and also help yourself get into building things then make sure to check out my website where you can get a kit of an RC hovercraft that's perfect for beginners getting into RC projects as you can purchase the plans and the templates and everything on there and find a list of electronics and everything else that you need and through doing that you'll be helping me to get a bigger jet engine for the next project there's also links to articles that are written in more depth about all of my different projects there's a link in the description so make sure to go and check out store.projectair.co.uk but also make sure to go and check out this video next as I think you'll enjoy it if you've got to this point of this video and it's probably got something else going horrendously wrong in it

Channel: ProjectAir

Views: 872,121

Keywords: James Whomsley, whomsley, James, projectair, 3d printing, rc, r/c, airplane

Id: 1K9g4AWu3-c

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022