Destruction and Creation

19.30 in and, Boat Plans, bruces, creation, destruction, doodles, karaoke, pontoons

Sometimes the treasure hunt of creating something from salvaged materials is half the fun.  Okay,  Okay. Ill admit it, more than half the fun.  Ive been making art out of bullshit found in junkpiles and on dump runs for more than a decade. 

But when you want to create a barn or a shed or a shantyboat out of old barn wood and rusty sheet metal, you got to do some searching.  If you live in a less-than-rural area, good luck.  On my country drives, the amount of rusty weathered junk in the yard of every farm we pass sets me drooling.  To find materials I have to get more creative.

This weekend we went out to the deep country of Hollister (made famous by Marlon Brando in The Wild One) to tear down an old chicken coop.  It was beautiful.  Beautiful country, beautiful weather, and beautiful 80 year old redwood lumber and rusty sheet metal.

Salvaging a building, involves deconstructing a building in the reverse order it was constructed.  We remove the shingles, then the roof battens, then the roof beams, and so on.  It is an interesting way to understand how a building is constructed. 

The chicken coop featured "single wall" construction.  That is, no stud framing, just siding that holds up the roof.  When we were done, we had a huge pile of beautiful old redwood 1x12s and a handful of redwood beams.  It was rough-cut "dimensional lumber," meaning a 2x4 actually measures 2 inches by 4 inches.

Jen and Kai helped disassemble the chicken coop, and then Alex helped disassemble a nearby outhouse the next weekend.  This lumber will be used to construct the cabin on our shantyboat.  The corrugated metal will form the roofs over the cabin and porches. 

Walking out into the nearby fields we found an old shack with gorgeous peeling paint patterns.  Hard not to joink this door as our shantyboat door.

I get hot just looking at old weathered textures.  In some ways, for better or worse, it is my love of this aesthetic which guides a lot of the decisions about the shantyboat.

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Bruces Pontoons

06.34 in a, beyond, Boat Plans, bruces, calculating, hard, is, math, napkin, plans, pontoons, waterline

We were planning to use Bruces pontoon boat that he scored somewhere around the Lake Shasta area as the base for our shantyboat.  In fact, it was Bruces pontoon boat score that gave us the greenlight for this project.  Not so sure about this now.  Every boat has a buoyancy, a certain weight that it can support safely.  Bruce writes:

I dont know how easy it is to calculate this. During high school geometry I had a crush on the Castellucio twin sisters (Karyn and Kathleen) and most of my mental energies were taken up by trying to flirt with the two of them rather than on the substance of the coursework. I havent really revisited the subject of geometry (nor, alas, the Castellucios) since that time.

The pontoons are sort of irregular shaped, they are flat on the top and sort of u-shaped on the bottom. The top to bottom dimension is 17 1/2". They are 18 1/2" wide.  As Ive mentioned before, the platform is 16 long. The pontoons extend another 18" to the rear of the platform. They also extend about 24" to the front of the platform. However, in the front they are tapering down to be much more narrow, expecially in that last foot.

Okay, Im gonna make some assumptions about Bruces pontoon boat.  Doing some crazy math that requires me to get out my geometry book again, I guesstimate the total cross-sectional area of the pontoon is about 2 sq ft.  To get the volume, we multiply that times the length. Well say that is 16 feet + another 1.5 ft at the back, and another maybe 1 foot at the front. For 18.5 feet. So the volume of one pontoon is perhaps 37 cu ft.

We just look at one pontoon, because we want to make sure that the capacity we work with never exceeds the floatation of one pontoon, lest a shift in weight drive it under the water and flip the craft. This situation even has an ominous-sounding name:  Pontoon Effect.  Plus, if you think about two pontoons, you want them both no more than half in the water.

To get the floatation, we multiply the volume times the weight of the same amount of water. Thanks, Archimedes.  One cu ft of fresh water weighs 62.4 lbs. So the flotation of one pontoon is 37 cu ft  * 62.4 lbs/cu ft = 2308 lbs. So the weight of the boat, plus the passengers, plus their gear and stuff, plus some margin of safety 10 to 25% should not exceed 2308 lbs.

Probably too tiny for our heavy shantyboat. However, we can build Bruces pontoon out to be a little hillbilly sun porch to accompany our shantyboat.  Something like this...

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