Plywood Power Boat

Feedly fed out a mini power boat this morning, available as either plans or a kit. The kit is laser cut plywood, 3D printed parts, and some other materials, and on quick inspection it looks to be Maslowable, no tricky small features. I didn’t figure deep enough to find how the kit is delivered, i.e. on paper or as cuttable files, but it was designed in Solidworks

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@mooselake

That’s cool but . might not make it up ad down the swamp lands.

Thank you

Yup, the swamp rats are probably bigger :rofl:

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Hip waders or long moose legs, our swamps are too brushy for airboats.

OTOH, the 1200A lake down the hill has a lot of northern pike, and there’s a couple of boatable rivers nearby that’ll melt out in 3 or 4 months. Alas, the half mile of river that we own is too shallow for a motorized contraption although it kayaks well other than the beaver and swamprat dams

Loads of stitch and glue boat plans on the internet for everything from simple rowing prams to true yachts. This is one of the reasons I was interested in the MASLOW CNC Kit. It is ideal for cutting out the panels of plywood for these boats. The problem is that you can’t buy decent marine grade plywood in the United States unless you are on the coast somewhere are willing to pay $100 a sheet for 1/8 inch plywood. If you have a nearby source of marine grade plywood though composites and material for sealing and protecting the boat are readily available online and pretty affordable. If you can get the plywood for a reasonable price you could technically build a multi-million dollar boat hull the same way a commercial shipyard would do it and the cost would be miniscule compared to what the hull would cost if you had it built. The problem is that true marine grade plywood and even AB Fir is almost impossible to source at any price in most of the country and if you can source it the cost is outrageous.

Take a look bateau.com for ideas and sources for stitch and glue boats. There are thousands of owner built boats around the world and the method is identical to that used by almost all boat manufacturers. There is some meranti / okuma / AB Fir in almost every boat hull built in the world today.

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