Hover Sled Part III

  YAWN! 6 AM is entirely too early to be sitting in the office at my desk. Yet, here I am torn from the comfy confines of my suburban bed, greasing the wheels of our economy by crunching and pumping out code that makes some things talk to other things in a way that they  both agree on quantities shipped and dollars spent. Such is the life of a codemonkey at a distribution company.

                This past weekend was a long one for me. I took last Thursday and Friday off for a little vacation to celebrate my wife’s birthday. As a result, not a lot was done to the hover sled. I did, however finally fulfill my lifelong dream of knowing what it was like to be flushed down a toilet. There really is no other way to describe the experience I had on this particular water slide at Hershey Park. I use this analogy because of the way you are literally flushed out the bottom of the slide, and more importantly because the people that I encountered at the end of it really did act like turds. They just sort of floated about in the pool with various bits of food stuck to them. Regardless I had a good time and was pretty exhausted when I arrived home. That of course did not stop the wheels of progress. I did manage to get SOME things done to the sled.

One of the things that held my concern was how far the vent pipe would protrude from the bottom of the disc.

If I wanted the vent pipe to be secure against the disc I would need it to protrude at least a little from the bottom. To minimize this distance I used a PVC coupling that I cut down with the miter saw. You can view this below along with mounts for the power plant and the seating.

Once the vent pipe was installed I used a sort of woodworkers putty/glue to secure it into the hole.

 

With everything all secured and glued into place. I placed the disc up on wood blocks to keep the PVC coupling from touching the ground as it stuck out the bottom of the disc.

 

The vent pipe sticking out still had me concerned. Sure I could place the skirt over it and for the most part the whole thing would probably work, but I did not like the fact that something would be sticking out of the bottom and could possibly tear the skirt if I hit something. I needed something that would lift the disc off of the ground and still allow some flexibility for the skirt to be freely inflated. Something soft yet ridged. Something I can easily affix to the bottom of the disc. My solution?

A Pool Noodle

These things are cheap and have all the properties to fit my needs. I think I spent $1.99 on one at Target. What else can you buy for $1.99? I just need to run some tests on how I can secure pieces of this to the bottom of the disc. I figure I can slice it down like a meatloafinto 2 inch thick pieces and then line the outer perimeter of the disc with them. I took a small slice and used epoxyto affix it to a scrap piece of OSB. I then placed a weight on top of it and let it sit overnight. The result was perfect. No matter how hard I tried I could not pull the noodle off of the OSB. I just need to slice the noodle down and get to gluing.

So far I have been pretty impressed with my budget on this project. I have only spent, nine dollars on the OSB, sixty-eight cents on the PVC coupling and a dollar ninety-nine on the pool  noodle. I might have to shell out for some more epoxyand that will be around ten dollars but over all for night after night’s worth of entertainment you cannot beat the price.

More to come…