A long winter has a way of making a lot of us northerners a little bit squirrly. In [Build N Pulsejets]’s case, squirly enough to mount a home-made propane-powered pulse-jet to a kids’ kick scooter and take to the frozen lake for a rip.
Okay, well, it started as a kid’s scooter, but after trying it on the ice sans pulsejet, [Build N] decided that his cabin fever wasn’t quite bad enough to risk using it in stock configuration. Before mounting the 180 lb thrust (800 N) pulse jet he’d built in a previous video, a few modifications would be needed. Namely, a trio of scrap metal skis and a goodly amount of metalwork to mount them, and the pulse jet. Even on ice, with relatively little friction, the mass of maker and a full propane tank meant the acceleration wasn’t great, but he did get it over 44 mph (77 km/h) on the snowmobile drag strip. (Yeah, snowmobile drag racing’s a thing in the frozen north. Those of you sipping mai tais in the tropics are probably pretty jealous right now, huh?)
These pages have been no stranger to pulse jets, given that they’re probably the easiest engine to build at home. We’ve seen them mounted on everything from go karts, to Swedish snomobiles, and even tea kettles. Actually, we’ve seen two of those. No points for guessing what nation the tea kettle builds hail from.