The Build
The Beach Bums
The Beach Bums aimed to build an unconventional catamaran-style airboat and used a powerful but lightweight engine, attaching a prop and mounting this onto a light frame with one large rudder for steering.
A mad plan for a suitably insane team who, under the all-knowing Jeremy Harris, were doing incredibly well until an oversight meant they welded the frame of their lightweight airboat around the build area engine hoist.
This unfortunately was not the only mistake made by the Torquay talkers. Simon and Gilly hunting down an old microlight engine with prop attached was a great scavenge; but what wasn’t so great was not actually testing the engine until they had built their catamaran craft around it – a classic scrapheap oversight. If the engine wasn’t a runner the Beach Bums may have stalled at the very first hurdle and yet again a Scrapheap water challenge would be drowned.
The Diggers
Unlike their opponents, the no-nonsense Diggers planned to take a more conventional route. Using a single, large, flat-bottomed hull they wanted to mount a four-stroke motorbike engine on the back and attach a large fan onto it to give them the necessary grunt, with two rudders positioned behind the fan.
Although an idea ideally suited to these plant machinery drivers from Humberside, the engineering intricacies begin to play havoc with team spirit. Alistair and Jon fell out over some fabricated rudder mounts and a misunderstanding between Captain Paul and expert Tony meant it was back to the drawing board.
Once these finer engineering details were behind them, the lads really got a shift on and completed what is arguably a far more difficult build – producing what the judge described as 'an actual air boat'.
