With fall quickly approaching, it's time to break out the rakes or the leaf blowers, depending on how you roll. If you happen to have a leaf blower, here's a project you can make with your kids that will blow their minds. In fact, this project is so cool that those of us who are morally opposed to leaf blowers may find ourselves asking to borrow the neighbor's.
The crew at The Makeshop Show has done it again. Tapping into every adolescent sci-fi fan's dream, their latest video details how to make a hovercraft out of a shower curtain, a piece of plywood and a leaf blower. By following these free plans, a young maker and his adult assistant manage to build a fully functional hovercraft in no time at all. The video is a little long, but if anything skip to the end to watch them scooting around the shop.
It is surprising how simple this project is, and even more surprising how well it works, even with the two of them aboard. They use a corded leaf blower in the video, but if you could get your hands on a cordless one, just imagine the possibilities.
• See more: The Makeshop Show
(Video and Image: The Makeshop Show Via: MAKE)
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Cordless ones don't tend to put out as much air, so YMMV. They do work fairly well; we made one in college to have at a kid's event for our engineering school and it worked fairly well with the kids, slightly worse with adults/college students.
I judged a science and engineering fair a few years ago where it felt like every fourth project was one of these. A bit of questioning and it became clear the whole idea was just downloaded from a website that lists out science fair projects.
Please, please encourage your child to come up with a question they are seriously interested in. Those projects are so much better and the kids are so much more passionate even if the question seems elementary.
The other name for this would be child deafener. Make sure they wear hearing protection. I don't like the idea of putting a leaf blower next to my child's ears.
Kudos to the original inventor, and thanks to Makeshop Show & AptTher for letting me know that such a magical item exists. How do you steer it?
I am in favor of anything that has a parent and child working together, building and exploring new possibilities! Kudos to this team and for allowing more families to know it's good to re-think and reinvent!
I built one of these when I was ten with my dad, before it was the cool thing to do. A lot of fun, but you need a lot of power for it to actually work.
Moo hoo ha haaa! The infectious hovercraft-meme takes over the world!
I saw the "human air-hockey puck" in 1980s teaching magazines, and was using it for science-outreach in Seattle in 1992. I realized that the entire internet was nearly hovercraft free, and the secret was almost lost and buried in old journals. So finally in 1997 I wrote up the idea as a kids project on SCIENCE HOBBYIST. Kids could use it to amaze their physics teachers. It really, ahem, took off. Even made it on to mythbusters.
Who was the original inventor? The trick was known in industry going way back (used to move giant machines using a compressor and a flat plate.) I thought the teacher-version was the 1989 author in The Physics Teacher, but probably it's Barbara Saur of Kent, WA, see this 1987 ref:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/phys/pdf/hover.pdf
And no, it's not an experiment. It's more like LIQUID NITROGEN ICE CREAM, intended to warp the minds of the young and turn them into huge raving scientists.
> How do you steer it?
Very dangerous: attach a lawn-chair and two CO2 fire extinguishers pointing backwards. It's like flying the lunar lander: You fire thrusters like POW... POW..., making small corrections and trying to avoid fast spins. But if you turn them on full, you'll be up to 20MPH almost immediately. No brakes, so you'll need something like a frozen lake or salt flats to use it safely.