Shantyboat
The floating heart of the project—its construction, its quirks, its journey. A home, a vessel, a work of art on the move.
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Correcting Mistakes II: The Usefulness of Square Corners
When we went to put sheets of plywood on the top, er, bottom of the boat hull, they didn’t really line up. WTF? It seemed unlikely that four sheets of plywood were manufactured not quite square, so we had to look elsewhere. When we assembled the stringers with the cross beams, we had squared the…
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Correcting Mistakes I
Today, the chickens come home to roost. Remember that pesky three degree error? As we assembled each of the stringers, we could see that the pieces didn’t come together quite right. It would have been laborious but simple enough to cut new ones, but oh no. I figured I could just cheat the difference on…
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Cross beams
This was an exciting day because for the first time, the boat was one piece. Not just a pile of lumber. Not just a bunch of stringers. But one single solid piece that was even boat shaped. More or less. Earlier when we were making the pieces for the stringers we trimmed a bunch of…
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Side Stringers
The side stringers are the sides of the boat. So far everything we’ve been doing was stuff inside; here we finally tackle something that will ultimately keep water out. Yikes! And because of the complexity of the build and our boat-tardedness, it took us about seven hours per side to assemble. In our last build…
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Keel and Skeg Stringers
It most conventionally built wooden boats, the frames refer to what you might think of as the “ribs” of the boat running across ways (that’s “athwartship,” to you, matey!). In the Glen-L Waterlodge, the framing members run longitudinally and are called stringers. So building the boat frame means assembling the individual stringers and then tying…
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Epoxy is Stressful
You know the scene at the end of any action movie where the hero has minutes to disarm the bomb, cutting the wires in just the right sequence or he blows up the 747 full of schoolkids? Working with epoxy is just like that. In short, using epoxy involves mixing two dangerous chemicals together to…
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Angles and Precision
I have experience in the housebuilding, construction world. I used to joke with my workers when they’d talk about measurement in sixteenths. “Sixteenths? I didn’t know they made fractions smaller than eighths.” And in homebuilding, unless you are a finish carpenter, there is seldom need to take such fine measurements. Not so much in building…
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Making Sawdust
The whole process of building a boat involves cutting a lot of lumber, but at the beginning there were whole days of doing nothing but. The plans called for kiln-dried or air-dried lumber of no more than 12% moisture. I live in the hills of Northern California which at times is like living in a…
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Organization: How To Make Boatbuilding Not Suck
Boats are made of lots and lots of funny precision parts that all look more or less the same but are subtle different. A bow skeg stringer end accidentally exchanged for a stern skeg stringer end and it’s all over. The previous build day, in my excitement I threw together the dead simple building form,…
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First Build Day: Building Form
After months of hemming and hawing over plans and possibilities and uncertainties and even driving to the Middle of Nowhere to get a trailer, finally we start building the boat. Or at least we build something that is essential for building the boat. The Glen-L plans call for making a building form upon which to…
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Questions for the Old Man
I didn’t expect myself to be talking to the old man, the designer himself, bouncing my dumb ideas off him and hearing the edge of concern in his voice. I bought our Shantyboat plans from Glen-L Marine. The company was started by and named after Glen L. Witt, a boat designer who’s been designing boats…
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Boat Plans: Choices Made and Not Made
So it looks like we’re building a boat. Not merely throwing a bunch of shit on the deck of a couple pontoons, or strapping a bunch of barrels together, but making a boat. You know, one of those things that floats in the water and has things like a hull and a deck, not to…
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Boating errand in the flattest dryest spot in North America
“Ha ha,” said Alex when we took off with the 20 foot flatbed, “We were worried about the trailer, but just think, my tow kit is only being held on by four bolts.” Ha ha, I said. An hour later we were heading back to Reno after a dramatic bumper removal and whiplashing trailer on…
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Tips on how not to die in a fiery ball of twisted metal on the highway
Anyone know anything about trailer tow hardware like sway bars and weight distributing whohaws and whatnots? The shantyboat we’re planning will be trailer-able. So if I’m gonna be towing a heavy-ass boat on a trailer down the road with a 20 foot double axle trailer with electric brakes, I want not to experience the sheer…
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Destruction and Creation
Sometimes the treasure hunt of creating something from salvaged materials is half the fun. Okay, Okay. I’ll admit it, more than half the fun. I’ve 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…
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Bruce’s Pontoons
We were planning to use Bruce’s pontoon boat that he scored somewhere around the Lake Shasta area as the base for our shantyboat. In fact, it was Bruce’s 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…
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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…