Over this past winter, a friend and I built a Snow Skimmer similar to the ones in Flitetest's recent video. We were originally going to build the one made by James Whomsley, but we needed to make many changes to the design to make it more suitable for our uses, so we started from scratch, using James's design just as a reference. We had a few old parts laying around, an EDF, some servos, an ESC, and a few batteries. We built the entire thing in roughly 5-6 hours out of some of our scrap pieces of foam, some BBQ skewers and hot glue. The front skewer has a hole through it right in the center where the servo arm is, and it is attached to the servo with just a piece of copper wire so that it can pivot. The ends of the skewers are attached to the pontoons with airplane plastic hinges, we also had this hooked up with a FPV system but I needed the camera for a quadcopter that I built. We could not buy Flitetest's waterproof foamboard so we just put some packaging tape on all of the bottom surfaces and then put WD40 on that to make it slide on the snow better. Today much of our snow here in Wisconsin melted, and I don't expect it to return until next year, and because of the warm temperatures the snow really grabbed at the bottom of the sled. To solve this, we just added another coat of WD40 to the bottom and it slides better now. The speed that the sled can go at is incredible, however it needs to be icy, today, because the snow was sticky, it could not go very fast, but in the right conditions, I would say that the snow skimmer can go upwards of 20 miles an hour! I encourage you to build this and make any modifications that you need to to make it suit your uses and enjoy!
(It's nicknamed The White Lobster :)
Thanks for reading!
No Comments Yet
Be the first to leave one!