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.
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“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.
“Every waking moment outside of school was spent on that craft. There would be evenings, there would be weekends,” he said, adding his wife helped him with certain elements of the craft along the way.
“It got to a fever where, as you saw the craft come together, it drove me harder to get going with it.”
Piece by piece, bit by bit, Tymofichuk carefully handcrafted every element of the craft, taking pieces from car salvage lots and local mechanic shops.
The cab of the hovercraft came from a 1997 Jeep Cherokee. The steering control started off as papier mâché that was moulded to Tymofichuk’s hands. It was then covered with fibreglass and filled with foam. The hovercraft is able to traverse from solid ground to ice, to snow and water.
“Each part that went into it was uniquely built because you just don’t go into the hardware store and say, ‘I’d like this and I’d like that,’” Tymofichuk said.
“It was built part by part and anyone can do anything if they put their mind to it.”
Tymofichuk hopes his students take inspiration from his dedication.
“If they have a dream, it’s just a matter of some work in between in order to make it happen. That’s what the bottom line is.”
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