Hendo Hoverboards Is Offering a Working Hoverboard In Exchange for Backing Their Kickstarter at the…

Hendo Hoverboards Is Offering a Working Hoverboard In Exchange for Backing Their Kickstarter at the $10,000 Level

Okay, admit it. There was at least one night in your life where you got a little tipsy and started talking about how you could build a working hoverboard.

Like, you’d just have to make sure the air jets pushing down would create the right amount of lift, or something. Or what if you made a hoverboard court out of magnets, and then made the hoverboard out of opposing magnets so they’d repel each other? It would totally work!

Well, now you have the opportunity to back Hendo Hoverboards on Kickstarter, and, for $10,000, get a real hoverboard of your very own.

How does it work? I watched the Kickstarter video to find out more:

(The best part of the video is the part where they say “Imagine a vehicle with all the freedom of a car and all the efficiency of a high-speed train,” because, honestly, that sounds terrifying.)

The Kickstarter promo video does not explain how the hoverboard hovers — which, I mean, how could they leave that out — but if you read a bit further down into the Kickstarter page you get this:

The magic behind the hoverboard lies in its four disc-shaped hover engines. These create a special magnetic field which literally pushes against itself, generating the lift which levitates our board off the ground.

While our hoverboard is primarily intended to be self-propelled, the actions which stabilize it can also be used to drive it forward by altering the projected force on the surface below.

Currently, this surface needs to be a non-ferromagnetic conductor. Right now we use commonly available metals in a simple sheets, but we are working on new compounds and new configurations to maximize our technology and minimize costs.

It was magnets this entire time! I was right, other people in the bar who were with me that night! We could totally build a working hoverboard out of magnets!

(It’s worth reading the entire Kickstarter page, because they actually go into the physics on how they got it to work. Also, I hope that somebody who actually knows physics can explain it to the rest of us.)

I don’t have $10K to spend on a hoverboard, but I look forward to seeing the reviews from the people who do. Also, you’d better save a little extra cash for a trip to their hoverpark (location currently not designated), because your hoverboard will only hover on special surfaces.

If you don’t have $10K either, you could spend $299 on their Whitebox Developer Kit, which includes “a Hendo hover engine set, and enough surface to hover it on.” There might be a loophole here, too: if five people bought hover surface, and then they created their own hoverboard out of the hover engines, would they be able to make their own teeny-tiny hover area without spending the full $10K? (I wouldn’t recommend trying it without knowing a lot about physics and engineering and also wearing a helmet.)

Anyway, hoverboards are real, they’ve arrived right on schedule, and they’re currently selling at the $10,000 price point.

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