Build Your Blimp
To build your blimp, you can not only use the off-the-shelf blimp as shown in the Quick Start on the market. You can also have the following options:
- 36 inch balloon: Sphere shape or Heart shape. These balloon gives you the minimum capacity but the smallest size to hold everything we provided. However, some modification is required to make for it to hold all the payloads.
- DIY Balloon: This will give you the most freedom of making customized shape of your blimp.
DIY Balloon
Materials preparation
Before you DIY your own blimp, please prepare the following materials.
- Envelope material: Mylar sheet. If you want to know the reason why we pick Mylar as our first choice, please check Different Materials.
- Tools:
- Masking/Painter's tape: You can buy these at Walmart, Homedepo, Target or any other store. You may also need some other tape like scotch tape, Duct tape
- scissors: You need to cut the mylar sheet with it, please do not use knife, it will be easier and safer to cut with scissors.
- Mylar sealer: This will be the key tool to seal your mylar sheet.
- soldering iron: This will cut out the sealed mylar after you seal it.
- parchment paper: This is for isolate your mylar sealer from attaching the mylar directly. You can get this in any super market like Ralphs, Whole Foods and so on.
- Infrastructure:
- Tables: It should be bigger than your DIY balloon size. If one table is not big enough, you can attach two or more tables together.
- Plywood: It really depends on how big you want to make your blimp. If you want to make bigger balloon, you can use bigger size plywood. It's not necessary to just my link.
Manufacture process
There are two different ways we've explored to manufacture a balloon that has high quality and less gas leakage problems to worry about in the future:
- Method 1: Double-sided mylar balloon
- Method 2: Starfruit mylar balloon
Method 1 is most recommended and easier and more friendly to a newbie.
For method 1, Please check Blimp Manufacturing:Mylar Blimp Envelope.