Hovercraft Video
Detailed Plans
I am so going to try this with a gas powered blower.
Science Fair Project Hovercraft.doc (63 KB)
Link didn’t work for me. Could you really make a hovercraft powered by a small gas blower pick up a human? Or we talking about taking the neighbors cat down the street?
DIY Presentation next month? 
Typo in the address, fixed
Check the video it works. I went through a few of the links and there are a few variations but they all seem to work. I have the blower so I am going to try it this summer if I have an extra minute. I have 98% of the needed supplies so it would be cheap to build
Oh yeah, Old school heavy lift technology. We used to use air glides or air casters very similar to that to effortlessly slide 60 ton heat exchangers across the turbine building floor from lifting point at the end of the building and set them on their anchor bolts. the power of a little air pressure over a few square feet is amazing. We smoothed and leveled the concrete deck, 2 or 3 stories up in the building, with leveling concrete. then lay down plain old linoleum for the glide track. then place two 3 or 4 foot diameter air glide plates with rubber skirts under the heat exchanger and block and jack it up as much as needed to clear the anchor bolts. Then pump 150-200 PSI air into the flat plate like glides which had hundreds of tiny air holes on its bottom face. and the 60 ton unit would rise and float on a 1/16 inch layer of air, and two men could just walk it down the turbine hall with one hand each on the heat exchanger to push and guide it. its like a friction free bearing.
figure 150 psi air going under a 4 ft diameter flat steel disk. thats about 1800 square inches of disk with 150 pounds of lift per inch. or 270,000 lbs of lift. or 135 tons lift each. with two you can move a whole lot with one finger. I miss doing big stuff like that. but that was a small lift, industrially. Now moving, and lifting a 1.2 million pound reactor vessel 120 feet up and over to the center of the building and setting it on its pins was a rare site. Construction sites are fun. Half of the move is 4000 year old Egyptian technology with some modern power tools. sliding the load on greased tracks with hydraulic jacks. then setting it down with the crane dolley.
The power of distributed air pressure is amazing. With properly sized air bags and a few Home Depot air compressors, we could jack your house up off the foundations, Al, Incase you wanted to add a second floor for a new fish tank room!