One of the most effective ways of convincing everybody you're crazy is to tell
them you're going to build a boat out of cardboard.
I got the idea of a cardboard boat from the Internet - I was looking
for some cardboard projects and I found that people were building cardboard
boats
and usually they were building them to compete in races - there's cardboard boat races where
you have a certain amount of time to build a boat
and then you race it across a lake
and whoever doesn't sink and gets there first wins
and uh... since i was gonna put the effort in to building a boat and I
wasn't really gonna put it in a competition
my goal was to make something that was a little more durable so i took a few ideas from
from certain plans and
added a few ideas of my own to build something that's actually pretty
durable. I've had it out
on the water several times over the last two three years.
This boat doesn't have any rigid materials like metal
or plastic or wood
it's made almost entirely out of cardboard
as you can see, I also used some paint
I used some varnish here on the bottom,
I used some newspaper,
and I hold it together with glue and tape.
These duct tape patches you see here are not part of the original construction
I found that duct tape is a quick way to patch a hole if you find
a hole just before you're ready to put on the lake or something
this is a quick way to make sure it doesn't leak
typically if i have the time the best way to patch this would be to
actually use varnish and
a small piece of newspaper - give it several coats
of varnish to seal it up.
When I build this boat I started with one big piece of cardboard
it was about eleven and a half feet long and about forty two inches wide
and I found this piece of cardboard
at the local appliance store. You'll find that
appliance stores have lots of cardboard that they need to dispose of
so that was a good resource for me you get the cardboard to build this.
Now what I did with the big piece of cardboard is, I just laid it out
and i folded up
nine inches of each side all the way along
to make the shape of the boat.
now on the front and the back
I had to cut
along the corner of the bottom, the
bottom part of the U
then I folded in the sides
and I cut off the extra
there was a triangle of cardboard here and one over there that I cut off.
On the front of the boat I did it just a little different than the back
once I folded in those side pieces I also cut a wedge out of here
that way the bottom would actually fold up a little bit
that way it stays above the waves a little better as you're moving forward.
Now any place where there were seems in the cardboard
and here along the front of the boat would've been one of them
I used this water activated paper tape
to hold those pieces together.
Basically with this tape all you do
is get it wet - use a foam brush or something to brush
just a little bit of water on there to moisten in the whole thing
and then you put that on there
and sticks very quickly and it sticks very well.
You do have to be careful
if you get too much water on here it doesn't stick too well. Don't actually
dunk it in water before you put it on - I found that that
doesn't work very well.
Once I had the outer hull of the boat complete
from that single sheet of cardboard
then I had to make its sturdy. So to do that
I simply
laminated more and more sheets of
cardboard on the sides and the bottom.
And these peices weren't always real big - just as big as I could get. I made sure
they were wedged in there tightly and made sure the other sheets fit tightly against
it.
And this process took time because what I had to do is take some Elmer's glue
either wood glue or regular white blue
and dilute it with water
and then use a foam brush to just brush it over top
the bottom of the boat
and then I took a piece of cardboard put on top of that
and then I'd have to take heavy objects and put it on top of that piece of
cardboard
to allow it to dry and to get sturdy.
So obviously it took some time because I had to wait for it to dry and then I had to put
another piece on
and them maybe put a piece on the side,
a piece toward the back and so forth.
So it took a few days to get so
pretty much all the boat - both
the bottom and the sides
were about four
pieces of cardboard thick
so at that point the boat
became pretty sturdy.
You can see right in the middle here there's something that looks like a beam
and what I did with that is to just
laminate a bunch of pieces of cardboard together,
use that
water activated paper tape to wrap it
so it became
a real sturdy beam, and almost felt like a 2x4
except obviously it was lighter and not as strong
and I put this clear from the front of the boat
the back of the boat.
The reason I did that is,
if you actually look up a couple videos on cardboard boat races
and you find the people that
built little canoes or kayaks like this one you'll find that,
as they ride in it, what would happen is their weight would push down
and the water would push up on the ends and soon
the boat would buckle in the middle
that seemed to be a recurring problem that I saw.
So the purpose of this is to keep that from happening
and then as you noticed I used
cardboard to make a seat here
and again I used several
pieces of cardboard
laminated together to make the seat nice and sturdy
but the seat is sitting right on this beam
and so the idea there is when i'm sitting in there
my weight is distributed along
the whole bottom of the boat
as long as this beam holds up
and hopefully that'll keep it
from buckling in the middle.
To finish the inside of the boat I used that
textured latex Dry Lock paint that you use in your basement to cover
blocks with.
This is designed to be water resistant
and that texture makes so things don't get slippery when it gets wet on the
inside of the boat.
What I did to finish the boat is coat the entire outside with spar varnish
and then I laid a piece of newspaper, just a single sheet
over top of that and made sure I smooth out all the bubbles
and of course that stuck fast to the wet varnish
and then once that was dry I put yet another coat on and again put another
piece of newspaper and I did that about six times.
There was a layer of varnish, then a layer of newspaper, and so forth.
and that makes a really tough coat - it kind of feels like plastic but it
is just
newspaper and varnish.
If there's anything that isn't clear in this video or if you have questions
about my cardboard boat, feel free to leave a comment.
As always, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time!