The invoice for the fabric came in tonight, see it here in the gallery. http://balloonbuildingblog.com/gallery/?album=2&gallery=1

Total cost should come to around $5800 shipped, plus the fees to get it cleared and delivered to me.

Tomorrow will be a trip to the bank to pay, and then on the phone to start ordering all the bits needed, should start getting interesting soon.

Here is my first go at the design.

I have to say that this design is not original to me, I saw Keith Sproul’s balloon with the same design, different colours and really liked it. It is also a simple pattern for a home builder, yet very unique and striking.

As you can see there is 20 gores and 13 vertical panels, the bottom panel is Nomex and the top 2 or 3 (ABC) panels will be the longer lasting fabric. I realised when making this that the yellow peaks (made from normal fabric) will go into the stronger navy fabric, it’s not ideal but it should still be fine.

The fabric is what I would call “quasi-ordered” at the moment.

It has been “allocated” to me but I have not received an invoice to pay, so until I get that I don’t know a final cost or time frame, I am hoping to get the fabric within 2 weeks.

Here is what I have ordered:

Normal balloon fabric (know by some as “dura life” IIRC)
Ye0286 428.6mts (234.4m + 194.2m) (Yellow, see gallery for color sheet)
Na0693 318.8mts (50.7m + 213.2m + 54.9m) (Navy, same as the “Fat Boy Balloons” WOFYL navy)

Heavier stronger fabric, equivalent to HTN90 or Hyperlast
Na0693 126.3m (Smallest roll avaiable)

This is quite a bit more fabric than I need, or wanted, but it’s this or nothing.
My plans state that I need roughly 520m of fabric but thanks to some advice from Adam, I added a 35% “whoops” margin.
This still meant that I only wanted 350 yellow, 320 navy and 50 strong navy. The stronger fabric was intended to be used as a “lip” on the parachute and for the top panel, but with the length I am getting now, I could probably do it 3 panels down. One thing to mention that I am not doing this the 100% cheapest way I can, it works out to about $1k more for this stronger fabric, it may seem like alot right now but its all relative, I can afford it and I can have the piece of mind to know that if I trash the envelope I will last that little bit longer.

The fabric is really the starting line for me, once that is paid for its all guns blazing, but until I know that the fabric is on it’s way to me, I don’t really want to start doing much.

Hopefully I will receive an email in the next few hours on how to pay, as I usually get emails from Gelvenor around this time.

What?
The plan is to build a 69 size (69,000cuft 1955cum) hot air balloon, with lots of help from others but mainly by myself. My aim is to build this from start to finish using only “off the shelf” components which are the same as normal manafacturers would buy, effectivley cutting out the middle man so to speak.

Why?
Simply put, I cannot “afford” a brand new envelope, I am only 18 and while I could go and buy one right now, I would be pretty poor for a few years and I don’t really want to be making 20-30k investments at this stage.
The second reason is that I think its a great thing to do, and could be quite fun and also a great learning curve.

When?
As I said above, I am still 18, I finished highschool a few weeks ago and have nothing to do until Febuary-ish. After then I (hope, scores permitting) to go to uni, which will tie me up for about 4 years until I get a job and start working. It’s now or never.

How?
In a shed, armed with a Singer twin needle industrial sewing machine.

Welcome to my new blog.

Very soon I will be embarking on a journey which is to build and fly my own hot air balloon. This blog is going to be my way of recording everything that goes on throughout the process.

Hopefully once my project is finished, this blog will provide a little insight of the process from start to finish of building your very own hot air balloon, all the decisions made, the problems dealt with and all the processes undertaken.

Make sure you check out the gallery and the links over on the right.