Building Your OWN Zenair Float

Zenair now offers their popular experimental aircraft floats as a kit which can be built with relatively simple construction techniques. This provides a substantial reduction in the cost of ownership making floats now affordable for many aircraft owners. (See www.ZenairFloats.com for product information and prices)

If you have purchased a set of Zenair floats, this video will significantly speed your building progress as each step of the float construction is explained and demonstrated by our builder - providing an extremely valuable supplement to the supplied construction plans.

If you are thinking of purchasing a set of these floats, this video will provide the knowledge you need to understand the level of building complexity and skills required for a successful build.

For those that have prior experience building experimental metal aircraft, these floats provide little additional challenges in construction skills. For those builders without experience in metal fabrication, the video will provide the visual information needed to help evaluate the building challenge. The simple tools used in the float construction are shown and discussed where needed.

For those interested in constructing the non-amphibious ("straight") floats, the viewer will find this video perfectly useful by simply ignoring the procedures for creating the wheel wells and related assemblies.

The float built in this video is of the 1450 lb model. Other size floats provided by Zenair are constructed using a similar design and this video is beneficial in providing knowledge about these also. Zenair designed floats can be found on a wide variety of experimental aircraft and have been used for over 20 years.

The runtime of this double DVD video is approximately 2 hrs, 45 mins providing a great deal of detail for each step of the construction process. The ability to run your DVD player in a "fast forward" speed will provide a great deal of construction knowledge and reduce the details if they are not needed. The video is organized into video "chapters" that can be quickly navigated. The pictures on this page are still photos taken from the video.

While this video demonstrates the construction of a Zenair float, it does not show: the rigging of floats to an aircraft, spreader bars, mounting tires, nor other repetitive tasks such as painting, priming, riveting, etc. The effort was to keep the content of the video restricted to the unique tasks of float construction.