Don’t Buy a Hovercraft, And If You Do, Definitely Don’t Put Jet Engines on It

Screenshot: Rich Rebuilds via YouTube

Hovercrafts. Sure, they seem like a rad idea. I mean, you fire up a big ass fan and then blast across land or sea, lightning strike rescue style. In reality, they’re inefficient, hard to control, loud, and dumb, which is why they aren’t really a thing much anymore. Unless, of course, you’re Rich from Rich Rebuilds.

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Why him? Because he, for some reason, bought one of the commercially available Scat personal hovercrafts from the 1980s that ended up being a total basket case. Then he bought another one, and that one was also a pile. So, in classic Rich Rebuilds fashion, he just decided to escalate things to their overpowered, kinda dangerous, and super sketchy at best by adding not one but two jet engines.

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To help facilitate this conversion, he called Matt from the channel Warped Perception, who does a lot with these small jets. They set about configuring the duct for the main fan so it’s only inflating the hovercraft’s skirt and no longer providing forward thrust. Then they took a bunch of 2×4 lumber and built a swinging mount for the twin jets, then wired up all the control electronics for them.

To power the jet engines, the crew initially used kerosene which is super similar to commercial jet fuel, just less refined. That worked but was expensive, so they switched to diesel because turbines will run on almost anything.

The results are stupidly loud, surprisingly fast, and if Matt from Warped Perception is to be believed, it handles better than a stock Scat hovercraft.