Archive for the 'covering' Category
Friday, November 30th, 2007
Honey, I shrunk the boat…
I had to say it. Come on, how can you resist? Anyway, I managed to get the cover on myself but if I could do it again I’d want one other person help me with wrestling the 40# floppy bundle of plastic, especially when you have to some how throw the entire bundle on top of your 6′ tall frames… Once I got it there it was no problem though.
I didn’t have time to really shrink the whole boat so for now I used an electric heat gun to sort of tack the whole cover in place. If you heat up two pieces of shrink wrap and slam them together, they vulcanize and become one piece. I put a rope over the shrink wrap, around the whole boat, and then vulcanized it all the way around. The heat gun worked great for this purpose but to shrink the whole thing I’m going to need to come up with something gas fired. But for now the cover is on and is water tight. Considering how much simpler this cover could have been, and how little time it took me to do it, I don’t see why people pay $400-$500 to get this done.
The cost break down was:
- $200 for enough 8 mil (most boat yards use 5 or 6 mil by the way) for 3 covers
- $147 for the PVC (I’ll recoop $45 of this when I return some of the pipe)
- $38 in lumber and screws
- recycled rope
- old wire
- a bunch of time
total is $340 for all materials and $206 if you were to count that I only used 1/3 of the roll of shrink. Oh, and that $400-$500 estimate is just to have the plastic shrink wrap put on and shrunk, you have to make the frame… Not bad me thinks.
Thursday, November 29th, 2007
It’s a bloat!
“Bloat” was the best sounding version of the melding of the words “boat” and “blimp”. The other two were “bomp” or “blat” so I went with bloat, it also seems rather fitting considering how much fatter the frame will make Hobyn.
Monday, November 26th, 2007
Framing the winter cover
Before I shrink the boat, I have to frame it. I decided to go with a frame work made of 1 1/4″ PVC pipes attached to the stantion bases. So that the stantions themselves don’t act like levers as the frame moves with the wind, I took them all out and replaced them with 18″ pieces of pvc pipe. These new plastic stantions will allow the frame to move in the wind and don’t put any stress on the bases. The 1 1/4″ pvc is then screwed to the 3/4″, the 3/4″ is screwed into the bases, and the screws are tied to the bases with 250# test dacron (see, failed kite projects do get second chances). The pvc ribs will have a 1 1/4″ ridgepole at the top and each side will have 3 stringers made of 5/8″ x 1 1/2″ x 40′ douglas fir (aka ripped down homedepot 2×4’s). The whole thing will be clinched together with bailing wire with help from a Clamptite tool. Well, that’s the plan anyway.