This is a real, functional jet-propelled personal hovercraft,
and if you’ve played any of the Halo games you’ll also immediately recognise it
as the covenant ghost. It’s always been my favourite fictional vehicle,
so I just spent the last three months building it in real life – and this is the result.
OK, I haven’t been completely honest with you – the sound in that last clip was replaced.
And that’s because although this might hover and drive and boost and look like a real ghost, it
really doesn’t sound like it. It actually sounds like this:
If you think it kinda sounds like a furious lawnmower, well, that’s basically right,
because it uses the engine from one. Ghosts are meant to hover using an anti-gravity drive,
but I didn’t really feel like developing one, so instead I used a 4 stroke mower engine to power
a big fan which shoves a ton of air through this duct, and into the skirt and under the vehicle.
I made the skirt from transparent PVC to get it to look a bit floatier, but I know it still
doesn’t quite compare to the anti-gravity drive. For thrust, I’m using two small jet engines
attached under the wings, similar to the blue jets in the games. I’m sure I’m not the first person
to try powering a hovercraft with jet engines, but then, I couldn’t find anything legit on the
internet… so maybe I am? The jet engines are so loud they drown out the lawnmower engine, and they
burn through fuel at a frankly ludicrous rate. You really don’t want to be behind these, so I
oriented them slightly outwards from the driver. This only reduced the forward thrust by about 10%,
and made the vehicle’s turning much more sensitive – which I thought was a wonderful idea, but…
well, we’ll get back to that shortly. One of my favourite parts of the whole
build is the dashboard. There’s nothing special about it, I just think it’s cool. It’s got the
fuel and telemetry modules for each of the turbines, along with a tachometer, throttle,
choke, and fuel cut-off for the lift fan engine. And there used to be a kill switch as well,
except it started killing even when it wasn’t switched. So that had to go. The best part,
though, is the keyed ignition – if the covenant had thought of that, maybe the
Master Chief wouldn’t keep stealing their ghosts! Of course, on the first test I forgot the keys,
and had to hotwire the ghost to get it running. And then we soon found out we had a fuel leak.
Then after fixing that, it seemed to work,
but only at reduced power. So we took a bit of a pit stop, and found that the
dirt road on the drive here had actually vibrated the fan’s shaft connection loose,
and this whole time the engine was trying to chop itself to pieces using the metal fan hub.
Thankfully it didn’t manage to, but boy, did the performance increase when we fixed that up!
I should mention, my mate Dan helped me out a lot with the building onwards,
and we were also given a hand with testing by another friend, Justin, and by Julian,
whose farm we tested this on and who got up at 4am to help us shoot at sunrise! So, we gave Julian a
short ride on the ghost as a bit of a thank you. A big part of getting the hovering to work is
balancing out the lifting force with the weight. And so, to achieve this,
I printed out a reference model on a Halot One resin printer that Creality kindly gave me,
and then I used SolidWorks to design the whole thing from scratch in a way that looked like the
game model, but was more mechanically feasible. On top of the weight distribution, I also had to
design the whole structure to be as light and rigid as possible. So using a vacuum cleaner
and the incredible mass of the earth’s atmosphere to press everything together,
the deck was made from a composite of marine ply and aluminium with polystyrene in between,
which – in industry – is literally called a foam sandwich. Finally, the whole top
frame is made from welded aluminium tube. The construction for that ended up being
a massive task, and unfortunately, while I was welding it up, I accidentally dropped the welding
torch on my leg. Somehow, the blunt tip of the tungsten was apparently hot enough to cut my knee
nearly down to the bone. The doctor who stitched it up needed to check the ligament wasn’t damaged,
so he asked me to move my leg. And then when I did, he was like “oh good, I can see the ligament
moving back and forth in there so you’re fine”. So that was… uh… good? It made walking difficult
for a few days, but I was on a timeline, so I kept welding until I had the frame done.
It is 3:30am, and today has been my 6th(?) 18 hour day of cutting, and bending, and welding, and all
the frame stuff. But it’s done! So I’m going to go get some bed- some sleep. At- in bed. Yeah...
After the frame was done, I moved onto the all-aluminium panelling. Unfortunately I didn’t
have the tools, time or skill to make the front and back panelling properly curved like it is
in the game, but I think this dragon scale effect worked pretty well as the next best thing. Since
they were aluminium, I really wanted to get the panels anodised to get that bright purple colour
you can get using that process. But unfortunately the only South African anodiser I found who could
do large pieces only did grey and amber. And although it would be cool having my ghost In Amber
Clad, I ended up just spray painting it purple. It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty darn happy with
the way it all ended up looking. My 5th grade self would have been so pleased, and not just because
I liked Halo - but also because a hovercraft was actually the first big thing I ever built.
This is my hovercraft that I made off plans from the internet.
This is why is called a hovercraft – because when that inflates,
it comes out here and makes it hover. By the way, making this kind of simple hovercraft
yourself is actually super easy if you've got a leaf blower. Let me explain how while I tell you
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So, throughout all the testing the ghost performed pretty great. A lot of the things I was worried
about ended up working out perfectly. There was just one small issue, though.
“Well gents, that is very difficult to manoeuvre.” Yeah, you know how earlier I said I was happy
for the extra steering sensitivity? Well, it ended up being absolutely horrific – combined
with the 3-5 second delay in the jets ramping up and down, it was constantly a
struggle to avoid just doing donuts everywhere. I did get a couple of straight runs in though,
including this unfortunate one where Julian’s puppy left the car and tried to chase after
the ghost. Thankfully it wasn’t hurt… although I don’t know how the dog was.
No, I’m kidding! The puppy was fine but the ghost did actually crash and it got
a small tear in the skirt. It’s a very easy fix for next time though, so… see you then!