Raft construction

As I type this I'm watching the Delaware River .In the old days ,~ 100-200 years ago they shipped lumber down the river during the spring high water by making huge rafts of the logs. Funny thing is that if your raft disintegrated along the way you were considered a hero !!..When I was a kid I made a model of the famous Kon Tiki raft that went across the Pacific .Their raft was just a series of logs cut with grooves where the ropes held them together ,then a cabin was constructed on top . Did you want to leave Singapore ???
 
I've dound some cool stuff using google. My favorite was a pedal-powered raft made of two 55 gal drums and a bicycle.
 
Building a raft is not exceptionally difficult - essentially it's a platform made up of things that float which are tied together. The natural strength of rafts that allow them to cross oceans comes from the fact that the raft is flexible which allows it to better cope with the stresses of stormy seas. Whereas a ship might break apart on rough seas, a raft merely flexes and distorts but does not break.

But rafts of course have their disadvantages - they don't hold as much cargo as a ship and they aren't easy to navigate - they tend to float where the currents want to take them.

I built a raft with two friends in Guatemala and spent a week floating down a river - the locals helped us pick out which trees to cut down. That really is the key - whatever you build your raft from, it must float. After a week the platform of boards that served as our living space was barely an inch above the water - the logs beneath the boards had soaked up enough water that they didn't float nearly as well.
 
akennedy73 said:
Building a raft is not exceptionally difficult - essentially it's a platform made up of things that float which are tied together. The natural strength of rafts that allow them to cross oceans comes from the fact that the raft is flexible which allows it to better cope with the stresses of stormy seas. Whereas a ship might break apart on rough seas, a raft merely flexes and distorts but does not break.

But rafts of course have their disadvantages - they don't hold as much cargo as a ship and they aren't easy to navigate - they tend to float where the currents want to take them.

I built a raft with two friends in Guatemala and spent a week floating down a river - the locals helped us pick out which trees to cut down. That really is the key - whatever you build your raft from, it must float. After a week the platform of boards that served as our living space was barely an inch above the water - the logs beneath the boards had soaked up enough water that they didn't float nearly as well.
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Wow. What a neato adventure!!! Very impressive. You got any pics of that????
 
Fiddleback said:
Wow. What a neato adventure!!! Very impressive. You got any pics of that????
Click to expand...

I don't have any digital photos - it was a long time ago, in the mid-90s. It was a neat adventure but not as fun as it might sound - we had planned to spend two weeks on the raft, but quit after a week. The river moved much slower than we expected - at a snail's pace, literally. The raft was quite small - imagine three men living on top of a large table and you get the idea. There was only room for two to sleep - which worked out since one of us had to stay awake at night with a flashlight and warn off any riverboats from running us over in the dark. By the end our raft's logs had soaked up so much water that we were in constant danger of being flooded - cooking a meal involved a complex orchestra of every movement needing to be balanced out by a counter movement. Imagine reaching for say a jug of water and having to first ask your buddy to move over the opposite way to balance out the weight change you're about to make.

Getting off that raft and sitting down in a local tienda for a beer is one of those memories I'll go to my grave with - appropriately the village we decided to end our river journey was called Paradise. ;)
 
Man. Great posts. Thanks for the read!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
thank for the info. nope i do not want to leave singapore. i just need it to sail down a small cannal in a race. so i am fishing around for ideas. akennedy good adventure
 
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