Hover Sled Part IV

                Ok so with the recent amount of heat we have been having in New Jersey and the windfall of my ThreeDollar Thrift Store Score, I haven’t been focused enough to work on the Hover Sled. That is until a few folks prodded me. This morning however, it was just cool enough for me to tinker in the garage without a billion fly’s bumping into me for whatever reason. Because I can only mix and set epoxy once, I decided to hold off a bit on gluing things to the disc and rather measured some things out and do a bit of pondering.

 

Here we see the disc all cleaned off with a rough placing of parts.

 I stapled some weatherstripping to the edge of the disc to protect whatever skirt I use from ripping along the jagged edge.

I drilled a hole though an old lid used on a drywall Spackle bucket. I then put a bolt in it and screwed it into the center hole of the disc. This is just for measuring purposes. I plan to use a cleaner lid fastened to the disc with a small pipe that will allow me to take pressure reading. Some may be puzzled as to what the lid is used for. This will act like a big washer that will hold the center of the skirt against the disc and allow an air filled skirt to maintain a doughnut shape. The skirt will have strategically placed holes in it to allow air out and form a cushion of air. For now I am using this dirty lid to measure how far away from the center I will place the foam noodlestandoffs.

 

There are two configurations that I am pondering. One, in which the standoffs are half way across the radius of the disc and another where they are placed near the edge. I’m certainly no physicist and can only imagine the dynamics of the airflow involved here. So with three shots of espresso in my morning coffee with a soy milk topper here goes my thought process.

Varying the distances of the standoffs from the center of the disc changes the ratio of air relative from the inside of the skirt to what is under it. Furthermore the farther out from the center the standoffs are the more stability that can be achieve whenever a fat ass is plopped on top of the disc. With the standoffs closer to the center I would imagine that there is a larger area of air cushion that is more uniform. With the standoffs more distant from the center the air cushion is larger in volume but not as uniform over the entire area of the disc.

 

I had thought that maybe from writing this out I might come to an epiphany but that just never seemed to manifest itself, so I think I’ll just roll the dice and settle with the standoffs being father away from the center. Off the top of my head this would seem to be more stable. I guess I will just have to glue them on and see.