Steve Griffin's Balloon Building

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Welcome to my balloon building web site!

News Flash

19/9/2006: Another one of my homebuilt creations made it into the record books today. Over the course of the past 3 months I designed and constructed a super-light weight basket and ducted fan unit to go underneath the 'Eyestrain' envelope. This morning I managed to set world records for  altitude, distance and duration for BX-1 class, altitude for BX-2 class and to break the existing BX-2 class duration and distance records. Not a bad morning out (subject to ratification of course).

When the weather cools down next winter I will try and set some speed records with the same rig albeit with a few modifications based on observations made during today's flight. I expect that speeds of around 20 kph will be recorded in due course.

Back to reality now! This site is about some of my amateur built balloon projects. It contains some of the resources and documents that I have collected, designed and built during the course of building balloons.

I currently have 2 projects under way. 

• The envelope is ready for its C of A inspection. It is a 16 gore 1200 cubic meter / 42,000 cubic foot / AX-5 class balloon.   Its model designation is Light 'N' Easy -5. Prior to getting this balloon certified I need to finish building a single seat air chair gondola.
• A modern day attempt a building a completely solar powered balloon. This project is in its infancy at present. My present thoughts are that it will evolve into a mylar tetrahedral shaped balloon of around 2200 m³ (77,000 ft³⁾ capacity.

This page was last updated on 12-Feb-2007.