Truesee's Daily Wonder

20-year-old dream taking shape in backyard

Tyler Treadway

Sunday, August 30, 2009

GIFFORD — That thing in Dennis Schaller’s back yard off 45th Street looks like:

A. A scaled-down version of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon from “Star Wars.”

B. An Airstream trailer on steroids.

C. A DeLorean sports car from the early ’80s on some really serious steroids.

D. Absolutely nothing else at all.

“Most people think it’s a spaceship,” Schaller said of his silver creation that measures 56 feet long, 20 feet wide and 17 feet tall. “It was originally designed to be a hovercraft. Now it looks like it’s going to end up as a houseboat. I won’t live long enough to get enough money to make it a hovercraft — not unless I went back to work full time; and then I wouldn’t have the time to work on it.”

Inside the upper level of the 17-foot-tall vessel, craft designer and builder Dennis Schaller clears the floor of the bridge and what will be the captain’s quarters of the hovercraft/houseboat.

Dennis Schaller, 65, stands on the back door ramp of his steel spaceship-like creation of a boat he has been working on over the past 20 years in Gifford. Built from scratch, the 56-foot long 2-story vessel, designed to be a hovercraft, will wind up serving as a houseboat for the former engineer.

Dennis Schaller, 65, of Gifford, has been working on building a hovercraft/houseboat from scratch over the past 20 years.

One of several insulated grounding and tie-down lines secures the 2-story steel hovercraft/houseboat being build from scratch by Dennis Schaller in Gifford. The project which began in June of 1989 is being built from scrap.

Given Schaller’s background, the spaceship guess isn’t so far-fetched.

Schaller started building rockets when he was a kid. He made a solid-fuel jet engine in high school shop class and, at age 15, took first place in the engineering division of the 1960 Georgia State Science Fair for a rocket he’d built.

He was a rocket engine mechanic in the Air Force before becoming an electrical engineer with North American Aviation, where he worked on several Apollo missions, including the Apollo 11 craft that landed on the moon, and the early Space Shuttle program. He’s lived in Gifford since 1989.

That’s about the time he started working on his hovercraft/houseboat.

“It’s been a 20-year project,” the 65-year-old Schaller said. “So far.”

At the center of the craft is a travel trailer Schaller found in the woods in Fellsmere and bought for $100.

“I put a deck around the trailer, then a roof on the deck,” he said, “and then, well, it just kind of took off. Unfortunately, my dreams are bigger than my life is long and my pockets are deep.”

The vessel, for lack of a better word, is a mixture of the practical and the fanciful. The front door, for example, opens hydraulically like the alien spacecraft from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

“Not being a rich man, I’ve had to build a lot of it out of junk,” he said, noting the lifeboat is made from a former acid dipping vat from the Piper Aircraft plant in Vero Beach and an old satellite dish.

Schaller said he’d like to float the boat in Lake Okeechobee.

“I’ve got two more years to go if I keep working steady every day,” Schaller said. “Of course, I’ve been saying ‘two more years’ for about 10 years now.”

LINK TO VIDEO:

http://www.tcpalm.com/videos/detail/space-ship