The world’s fastest recycled toy and science project – a modular hovercraft kit made from up-cycled material
The Strawbees modular Hovercraft kit is the ultimate toy and science experience that hovers across land and sea at over 25 miles per hour (~40 km/h). Create your own spectacular design and race with your friends and family! One is fun, two are great, and four on a tricky track that you have built is the most fun thing you can do!
The Hovercraft experience is designed to be the most fun STEAM project ever. Learn about science, technology, engineering, art, and math and morph your classroom into a space of innovative inventions, and reuse everything year after year.
Strawbees inventor Erik Thorstensson has always been a fan of engineering and technology projects, with R/C planes and cars in particular.
One weekend he crashed his drone and wondered what he could do with the undamaged parts. He created the first prototype of the Hovercraft with cardboard and brought the first version to the Strawbees office. The team has, since that day, used the Hovercraft every day.
Erik loves to design and prototype, so he created the Hovercraft for every kid (and parent) to experience the design process and create their own spectacular and speedy (and flying?) design. The kit will ‘never’ break because it can be easily be revived with materials found in the waste bin.
Imagine creating a new design every summer and see the evolution. At what age will the daughter or son create a faster design than the parent?
The Hovercraft is a highly engineered product with speed variance, playfulness, modularity, and lightweight materials as key design criteria. The parts included are injection molded parts, electronics, cardboard, covers, and Strawbees to make the mechanical linkage system.
The box takes us back to the 1950s and the dream of flying cars of the future. Each kit contains the materials listed below, and depending on reward, have more to build additional hovercrafts, contain educational curriculum, or even the Inventor himself.
We have used this product now for two years and we all love it. We want inspire more kids, parents, and teachers to engage in design and creative engineering. To be able to produce at a cost level that enables a reasonable price, we need to get to a certain volume of products, and for that reason, we believe Kickstarter is the perfect place.
Please take a look at some high resolution images, movies and other press kit material at our Google Drive folder.
The Strawbees team has previous experience with two successful Kickstarters, and knows the dedication that you have to put into a project to make it happen. We promise that we will deliver a product higher than expected, and will work to deliver on time.
Delays that could occur is producing the tooling for the injection molded parts or if any of our technology partners are delayed due to capacity constraints.
However, we have a very good relationship with the producer of the products, and we have made proper due diligence regarding sourcing and tooling with the efforts to maintain momentum