Boat With My Hands

The idea of a self-made boat came completely by accident. I got a piece of good linoleum - a white color, hard, on a kapron base. The length of the piece was 2.6 m, width 1.3 m, thickness - about 2 mm.

For a long time this linoleum lay in the pantry until the children took it out and told me what could be done of it. Roll rolled roll, sat on the sheet one after another, bent the edges and turned the boat. "Swam" along the corridor.

I have only a few left to do, in their idea, to turn the sheet into a kind of Indian canoe.

To the edges of the future boards from the outside and from the inside along the entire length of the sheet I attached to the glue and nails the rails of the parallel bars with a cross section of 15 x 40 mm. From the 30-millimeter board cut out the stem and the trench. The lower part of these parts was machined along the radius, so that the linoleum did not break when it was crimped. The fore and aft edges of the folded sheet were pressed along the stem and the transom by means of clamps made of steel strip 2 x 25 mm (a wire of 3 - 5 mm in diameter can also be used for this purpose). To seal the connection of the linoleum with the transom and the stem between them, I laid a ring, glued from a strip of rubber.

In the bow and stern, the boat has a pair of uneven bars, which are connected to each other and to wooden parts through trunks, also carved from a board 30 mm thick. In addition, the board needs to be unfolded with two beams, which I made from old aluminum ski poles. Cutting off the tube of the correct length from the stick, I inserted wooden plugs 60 - 80 mm long at its ends and fixed them with screws. The ends of the plugs protruding from the tube and 15 mm in length enter the interior of the nests, which are cut out in the internal rail of the private beam; A screw 4 x 40 mm is screwed through the external rail into the plug.

Already after the testing of the canoe, which we used in a collapsible version (for transporting the stem, the trench and spacers were removed, and the casing, along with the parapet bars rolled into a 200 mm diameter roll), I was convinced of the need to install two laminated frames under the beams-struts X 30 mm, glued from thin slats on patterns. On these frames it is possible to put a light floor (pail) from plywood or rails, distributing the load from the passengers to a certain floor area and protecting the linoleum from wear.

And to further increase the likeness of the boat to the Indian canoe, in the nose and stern can be attached to the dies from the foam, giving them a characteristic shape. By the way, they will serve as blocks of emergency buoyancy in case of a boat overturning or flooding with a wave. At a length of 2.5 m (without endings), the boat was about 0.9 m wide; Weight - about 13 kg.

We experienced it in the winter on an ice-free lake. The boat was able to safely navigate in still water, even with a load of 120 kg (two adult men). Of course, for normal operation with such load, the length of the boat should be increased to 4.5 - 5 m, and the linoleum liner is supported by additional frames.

I think that instead of linoleum for sheathing a self-made boat, you can use another waterproof and flexible sheet material, for example cardboard or polyethylene of appropriate thickness.