This Alberta teacher spent 1,800 hours over 1 year building a homemade hovercraft from scratch

Robert Tymofichuk has been a teacher for 35 years. He recently spent about 1,800 hours over the course of a year building a homemade hovercraft. 

A small-town Alberta teacher hopes his hard work and dedication to build a hovercraft entirely from scratch serves as inspiration to his students that they can do anything if they set their mind to it.

“The sky’s the limit on anything you want to do in life and if you put enough energy into it, it’s going to turn out for you,” Robert Tymofichuk said.

Tymofichuk has been a teacher for 35 years. He teaches math, science and shop at New Myrnam School in Myrnam, Alta., a village of about 300 people east of Edmonton.

A self-proclaimed tinkerer, Tymofichuk became interested in homemade inventions as a young kid; in those days, there wasn’t a lot to watch on TV, he said.

One year, in the late fall, he saw a hovercraft take off at a lake and from that moment, he was inspired.

“There was a skim of ice just on the edge of the lake. The person started it up and essentially took off from land and they zipped across that ice, onto the water and there was hardly a wave. I was hooked at that point,” Tymofichuk said in a recent interview with Global News.

“It was one of those things where you wanted to have a hovercraft but you don’t exactly go to the local power sports dealer and say, ‘I’d like to buy a hovercraft.'”

When Tymofichuk was younger he worked with his dad to build a hovercraft, but after five years of work, the machine didn’t take off. Recently, he tried again, and spent about 1,800 hours over the course of a year building a homemade hovercraft.