Not much building this past weekend - just a lot of prepping and painting! Let me tell you, I am very pleased with the Krylon paints that I just bought. I usualy use Rust-Oleum, which are about eight-ten bucks a can, while these krylon cans only cost me 2 dollars each! Their spray nozzle is 100% better than the crap rust-oleum puts on their cans, and the paint dries in record time (about 15 mins compared to 45 for R.O.). I also like how smooth it lays down, even with an impatient painter like me who likes to spray two heavy coats instead of four light ones

On thing that I did build was a switch that controlled my lift motors. This is operated by the steering servo, which shuts off and turns on the fans at the extreme points in its rotation. If this gets annoying when I am running it, I can just take that switch and flip it so I can turn it on/off manualy. After testing my mechanism (it was successful and I am happy with it) I hooked up the forward motor and noticed a serious dropoff in the performance of the fans - DUH! I should have thought of this before but I never really got to it. The combined amp draw was more than the Nimh battery could provide so performance dropped.What was my solution? Drop in a lipo of course! After that treatment, there was no visible change in performance whether I was on or off throttle. Also, the craft is quite a bit lighter due to the removal of the Nimh brick... now it is slightly imbalanced as the back sags under the weight of the motor and the front raises and starts loosing air. To remedy this, I ended up moving the lipo as far forward as I could, and that helped a tad but not enough... I will see how I will solve this (add weight to the front, or make the back lighter) I did some test runs around the house and the craft can moveout fairly quickly and easily went over 1/2" obstacles (one of which happened to be my sleeping cat's tail - he was slightly perturbed). Smooth floors were the best ground to go over, yet the hovercraft could even master the coarse 1/2" carpet in the living room when it was at speed. Still no steering, so I did have a few crashes when I got trigger happy, but the craft is very strong and suffered no damage.

on a side note - when I painted the top of the hull white, I only masked the first inch of the skirt and tucked the rest under. That was a slight mistake as there is now a line of overspray on it and it is not coming off - however, I don't really mind as it looks kinda cool IMO. That is the one flaw of the weekend (aside from the time when I ran the propeller without the stand bolted down and added some black marks to the paint )