Hovercraft Skirts

Skirts!

Goldstein Hovercraft, LLC offers a unique type of skirt. Our skirts are extremely easy to attach and set up (compared to other model hovercraft designs). They also fit any shape hovercraft -- allowing you to experiment with different shaped hulls using the same skirt. And since most of our hovercraft work fine without a skirt, our skirts can be detached and reattached with ease.

As with all hovercraft, of any size, the skirt gives increased obstacle clearance by creating a flexible bottom to the craft which deforms around an obstacle rather than bouncing off of it. Indoors, the skirt helps the craft climb up and onto carpets, and then, at least for a non-shag carpet, the skirt helps the craft skim across them. Outdoors, the skirt allows the craft to negotiate life's inevitable bumps in the road, and also helps the craft negotiate snow.

A skirt also gives a hovercraft increased payload capacity. Are you interested in carrying heavier batteries or r/c equipment (or both)? A skirt will help your model manage the increased weight.

The tradeoff for this increased performance is that our crafts don't work well on water with a skirt. All of our various hovercraft designs are rather lightweight, and surface tension from skirt drag prevents models with skirts from going very quickly on water. Fortunately, most of our models go very quickly on water without skirts, again due to their lightweight design. For fast action over wet or dry surfaces, the skirt can easily be detached in just a few seconds (and when obstacles on land are encountered, the skirt can be attached again almost as quickly).

Watch a very small movie showing the GH-2 hovercraft speed over a book (movie: 162k, Quicktime format).

Some still shots from the movie.

Part 2: Double High Skirts

Don't miss our page on double height skirts!

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