You want a personal hovercraft. But even the cheapest hovercrafts are well beyond what your 9-to-5 grind’s going to let you afford. While it’s far from the most stylish solution, this Lawn Chair Hovercraft would make a fine set to get you started.
Made by Adam Savage at Wired’s Geek Dad blog, it’s a hovering platform with a plastic lawn chair attached on top. That means, you can plop down on your bottom comfortably, all while floating around the yard a couple inches off the ground.
Adam provides a full set of instructions for building the Lawn Chair Hovercraft, which he suggests as a weekend building project for you and the kids. Materials are, more or less, stuff you should find in your workshed, including a round piece of 0.75-inch plywood (for the base), a leaf blower (for the engine), a heavy-duty shower curtain (to act as the skirt of your hovercraft), two rolls of duct tape (yep, that much), the lid off a 1-gallon paint can, foam pipe insulation (to line the edges of the hovercraft with) and a whole bunch of screws.
Don’t particularly like ’em plastic chairs? Nobody does, really. If you’re going to substitute something else, though, make sure it’s something similarly light, lest the leaf blower might not be able to carry all the weight (especially considering your hefty beer gut).
Check out the link below for complete instructions on building the Lawn Chair Hovercraft.