The founder Arx Pax, which is looking to launch the world’s first hoverboard this year, has said the company is on track to meet its goal.
Greg Henderson, founder of Arx Pax (the maker of the Hendo
Hoverboard) told 3DPrint.com that mostly PLA filament had been used in
components for the several prototype
versions created so far.
“…[T]his is such a phenomenal technology because we are able
to rapidly iterate where it might [normally] take weeks of turnaround time to
design, test and build some component,” he told 3D print.com.
“We can even at a sub-scale test a component’s mechanical
connections, and all sorts of other things which would be [prohibitively]
expensive, but instead we are able to knock these things out, test and iterate
within a day.”
The scheduled launch of the Hendo board is October 21 this
year, to correspond with the date in the movie Back To The Future (1985) at the
which hero Marty McFly emerges from a time machine/car to see youths zipping
around the streets on hoverboards.
The boards work by “Magnetic Field Architecture”, according to the company’s website, a technology for which Henderson is the patent holder.
The hoverboards’ performance will be limited by the
requirement on copper surfaces to work properly, and they are expected to cost
about $US 10,000 each, according to an article on news.com.au
Henderson’s project was enabled by a Kickstarter campaign,
which reached its goal of $US 250,000 on December 15 last year, eventually
raising $US 510,590 through 3,169 backers.
Image: Amblin/Universal