them you're going to build a boat out of cardboard.

I got the idea of a cardboard boat from the Internet - I was looking

for some cardboard projects and I found that people were building cardboard

boats

and usually they were building them to compete in races - there's cardboard boat races where

you have a certain amount of time to build a boat

and then you race it across a lake

and whoever doesn't sink and gets there first wins

and uh... since i was gonna put the effort in to building a boat and I

wasn't really gonna put it in a competition

my goal was to make something that was a little more durable so i took a few ideas from

from certain plans and

added a few ideas of my own to build something that's actually pretty

durable. I've had it out

on the water several times over the last two three years.

This boat doesn't have any rigid materials like metal

or plastic or wood

it's made almost entirely out of cardboard

as you can see, I also used some paint

I used some varnish here on the bottom,

I used some newspaper,

and I hold it together with glue and tape.

These duct tape patches you see here are not part of the original construction

I found that duct tape is a quick way to patch a hole if you find

a hole just before you're ready to put on the lake or something

this is a quick way to make sure it doesn't leak

typically if i have the time the best way to patch this would be to

actually use varnish and

a small piece of newspaper - give it several coats

of varnish to seal it up.

When I build this boat I started with one big piece of cardboard

it was about eleven and a half feet long and about forty two inches wide

and I found this piece of cardboard

at the local appliance store. You'll find that

appliance stores have lots of cardboard that they need to dispose of

so that was a good resource for me you get the cardboard to build this.

Now what I did with the big piece of cardboard is, I just laid it out

and i folded up

nine inches of each side all the way along

to make the shape of the boat.

now on the front and the back

I had to cut

along the corner of the bottom, the

bottom part of the U

then I folded in the sides

and I cut off the extra

there was a triangle of cardboard here and one over there that I cut off.

On the front of the boat I did it just a little different than the back

once I folded in those side pieces I also cut a wedge out of here

that way the bottom would actually fold up a little bit

that way it stays above the waves a little better as you're moving forward.

Now any place where there were seems in the cardboard

and here along the front of the boat would've been one of them

I used this water activated paper tape

to hold those pieces together.

Basically with this tape all you do

is get it wet - use a foam brush or something to brush

just a little bit of water on there to moisten in the whole thing

and then you put that on there

and sticks very quickly and it sticks very well.

You do have to be careful

if you get too much water on here it doesn't stick too well. Don't actually

dunk it in water before you put it on - I found that that

doesn't work very well.

Once I had the outer hull of the boat complete

from that single sheet of cardboard

then I had to make its sturdy. So to do that

I simply

laminated more and more sheets of

cardboard on the sides and the bottom.

And these peices weren't always real big - just as big as I could get. I made sure

they were wedged in there tightly and made sure the other sheets fit tightly against

it.

And this process took time because what I had to do is take some Elmer's glue

either wood glue or regular white blue

and dilute it with water

and then use a foam brush to just brush it over top

the bottom of the boat

and then I took a piece of cardboard put on top of that

and then I'd have to take heavy objects and put it on top of that piece of

cardboard

to allow it to dry and to get sturdy.

So obviously it took some time because I had to wait for it to dry and then I had to put

another piece on

and them maybe put a piece on the side,

a piece toward the back and so forth.

So it took a few days to get so

pretty much all the boat - both

the bottom and the sides

were about four

pieces of cardboard thick

so at that point the boat

became pretty sturdy.

You can see right in the middle here there's something that looks like a beam

and what I did with that is to just

laminate a bunch of pieces of cardboard together,

use that

water activated paper tape to wrap it

so it became

a real sturdy beam, and almost felt like a 2x4

except obviously it was lighter and not as strong

and I put this clear from the front of the boat

the back of the boat.

The reason I did that is,

if you actually look up a couple videos on cardboard boat races

and you find the people that

built little canoes or kayaks like this one you'll find that,

as they ride in it, what would happen is their weight would push down

and the water would push up on the ends and soon

the boat would buckle in the middle

that seemed to be a recurring problem that I saw.

So the purpose of this is to keep that from happening

and then as you noticed I used

cardboard to make a seat here

and again I used several

pieces of cardboard

laminated together to make the seat nice and sturdy

but the seat is sitting right on this beam

and so the idea there is when i'm sitting in there

my weight is distributed along

the whole bottom of the boat

as long as this beam holds up

and hopefully that'll keep it

from buckling in the middle.

To finish the inside of the boat I used that

textured latex Dry Lock paint that you use in your basement to cover

blocks with.

This is designed to be water resistant

and that texture makes so things don't get slippery when it gets wet on the

inside of the boat.

What I did to finish the boat is coat the entire outside with spar varnish

and then I laid a piece of newspaper, just a single sheet

over top of that and made sure I smooth out all the bubbles

and of course that stuck fast to the wet varnish

and then once that was dry I put yet another coat on and again put another

piece of newspaper and I did that about six times.

There was a layer of varnish, then a layer of newspaper, and so forth.

and that makes a really tough coat - it kind of feels like plastic but it

is just

newspaper and varnish.

If there's anything that isn't clear in this video or if you have questions

about my cardboard boat, feel free to leave a comment.

As always, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time!