G'day All, You have a great thing going here. 18 months ago while bouncing around some ideas for activities for a scout venture in Darwin some scout leaders there mentioned the fun they had had on landyachts at a jamboree in South Australia. A bit of searching on the web and you fellows came up with just what was needed. So Mud Skipper (light green) and Blue Swimmer (blue)were the result.
Great plans and the humour behind some of the construction descriptions shows true craftsmanship - Thanks Paul and crew.
The design brief was for something that could be used on Gunn Point beach which has plenty of room at low tide. Having a tiny bit of Scottish ancestry from many generations back meant as much as possible had to scrounged for the build. The Darwin Tip shops helped immensely here.

Chassis was the traditional stop sign tubing. No choice but to buy new RHS for the rest because any RHS disappears quickly on the farm. Initially the wheelbarrow wheels were bought from the tip shop for $5 each with no two matching and bearings ranging from fair to loose and crunchy. I did not know how they would go on the sand so when a set of four nearly bald but still pumped up 8" golf buggy wheels popped up these were grabbed, again $5 each. (after getting my cousins to machine up and laser cut hubs for these the price jumped a little. )

A number of visits to ebay picked up a variety of sails, masts booms and odd bits. One sail cost me 99 cents but it was a 100km drive to pick it up. My collection of eighties and nineties windsurfer boards has grown!
The seats, booms and some of the masts were salvaged from Mobile telephone base station antennas. Many of the older mobile phone panel antennas you see on poles and towers have fibreglass front covers and are scrapped when pulled down. They make light weight seats. The booms were cut from mobile phone base station omni directional antennas and these particular ones used thin wall epoxy glass of about 60mm diameter. As well as the windsurfer masts a number of VHF base station whip antennas were cut down to fit into the mast step. Full circle here, 20 years ago the manufacturer of these antenna said they had sourced the antenna radomes from a mast manufacturer.
Apart from old pulleys from my yachts spare parts box there was no real cheap option there though BCF has some discounts a while ago.
The final result was the two shown with a third on the go now. The day the venture landyachting was scheduled had a light breeze that wasn't quite enough for the older teenagers to get too excited but the smallest lad there had a ball, getting up on 2 wheels easily. Approx 4m sails were used then. Today with winds varying between 30 and 50 kph and a 6.2m sail we had a ball running Mudskipper around a friends farm near Bourke. Black soil tracks are bumpier than sand and the burrs made running off the tracks a little uncomfortable.
Blue swimmer is still with the scouts in Darwin and Mudskipper is back here in Bourke. We are trying to work out where to find a treeless claypan or salt flat. After todays fun version 3 has been given the go ahead.
Version three will probably have a chassis based on an aluminium Gyrocopter 65mm RHS rotor support given to me, it still has the gyrocopter registration sticker on it which is pretty cool. Bolts and plates will be used to adapt the rear axle and steering assembly.

Cheers
Colin