Wes Modes
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Math is Hard – Calculating a Waterline
Who would have thought boatbuilding would involve so much math? I was reading Glen L. Witt’s Boatbuilding With Plywood and realized what should have been obvious to me: The waterline of a boat is calculated beforehand. I guess it makes sense that boatbuilders don’t guesstimate their designs only to drop their boats into the water…
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Karaoke Doodles
So far, I’ve ignored the inside cabin layout, thinking that it would sort itself out eventually. But I got thinking, and with a few beers started doodling. I went to the normally quiet Trout Farm on Zayante Road (the same road on which we will build the shantyboat). Unbeknownst to me, it was karaoke night…
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Beyond Napkin Plans
I’m trying to turn my shantyboat speculations into something that feels a little bit more tangible. Ooo, graph paper! Getting fancy now. When I sketch it out proportionally, the shanty boat is less long and skinny than I had drawn it. In fact, it looks like a tiny shanty. On a boat. I’d kind of…
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Folding Gable Ends
We were aware that this beast with its generously gabled roof would be pretty tall. Especially on a flatbed. So I worked on some mechanism that would allow the gabled roof to fold down flat. The question is: How can you fold down the gables and then the two roof sections without anything binding? I…
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Boat Builder Porn
Is it hot in here, or is it just me? I spent a rainy Felton afternoon checking out shanty boat info on the World Wide Web. While there are many amazing photos and stuff, today boat plans are making me hot. Check this shit. This is the Escargot Canal Cruiser, designed by Phil Thiel of…
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WANTED
You know how many marinas there are in the Sacramento Delta? A lot, let me tell you. And I’ve called nearly every one in search of our elusive, inexpensive junked, but still floating, 20 foot-or-so pontoon boat. A few leads which I’m following up on. Kai and I also hung a flier up in a…
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Walls and diagonal bracing
I was worried that since we were planning to sheet only the outside with vertical boards, that the walls would have no sheer strength and would be subject to deformation by lateral forces such as wind, waves, and hitting an iceberg. Here is a suggestion from Aralia to give the walls sheer strength. We are…
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A Madcap Boat Scavenging Journey
Kai and I took a mad motorcycle trip up the Sacramento Delta to check out a couple of “pontoon boats.” They turned out to not only not be pontoon boats, but much longer than we were told and barely afloat. The first was a fiberglass houseboat around 35 feet or so, much too large, and…
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Inspiration
Looking around, shanty boats have been around for a long time. The dream of living on the water is hardly new. Shanty boats were the obvious choice for itinerant workers, miners, dockworkers, and farmers. And as living on land has felt more and more constrained, people have looked to the relative freedom of rivers, lakes,…
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A Mad Idea Fueled by Gin
It started with Camp Tipsy. Alex and I started talking about what we could build, what kind of floating contraption would excite us. We were unequivocally unanimous in wanting something like a tiny cabin that floats. Something that we could escape to. Or maybe it started earlier. Maybe it started with the river floats. For…
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Sketchy Napkin Plans
As with all great projects, this one started with a napkin drawing: While barrel floats have a long glorious history, we’ll probably do either pontoons or a full plywood-fiberglass hull. We won’t need any kind of keel with pontoons, but with a full hull, the keel is still an open question. Though apparently some…
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Beginnings
In 2005, I set out on a punk rafting journey, driving cross-country to Omaha, Nebraska, building a raft out of found and scavenged materials and floating for a week, Huck Finn-style, on one of the largest fastest rivers on the continent.
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The Shantyboat
A shantyboat is a small crude houseboat. There is a long history of people building and living in shantyboats, the obvious choice for itinerant workers, miners, dockworkers, and displaced agricultural workers. In 2012, I started creating my own shantyboat, largely from recycled materials. I built it from scratch and documented my progress online in a shantyboat…
