Best place for plans

[Alf]

Decided to go for fibreglass covered plywood after all. This is a project for me, (a 72 year old wrinklie), to keep my brain active in old age, and I'm wanting to know the best place, or site, for housboat plans. Free would be nice, but obviously willing to pay a reasonable price. any information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Alf.

[Tim B]

Glad to hear that someone is going for ply-wood, wood is a nice(and rewarding) material to work in. I have very little knowledge of house-boats, but from what I can see from examples I have seen is that there is typically a lot more super-structure than hull design involved. I would go as far as to say that it may be possible to get hold of the regulations and design it yourself. As I say, most of the work is interior anyway, outside, normal rules apply. Do bear in mind though, that houseboats are fairly heavy, and need a good amount of free-board, so the hull is not going to be small. However,it is an interesting challenge and I wish you the best of luck.

Tim Brocklehurst.

[SeaDrive]

Houseboats are of interest to many, and there is a lot of material on the internet. A lot depends on how big a project you want to get involved with. I am on several boat-building groups, and I can say that just about anything over 20' gets to be be a multi-year project. Many under 20', too. That's fine if you are mostly interested in building. Not so good if you are mostly interested in using the result.

Do you want a stationary houseboat or a really move-around vessel?

Some examples:

http://boatplans-online.com/index.php See the 25' garvey under powerboats. The $125 plans price is a tiny fraction of the materials would cost. There are smaller boats on that site of a house-boatish nature.

http://www.tantonyachts.com/images10.htm See design 987. There are lots of designs somewhat like this out there.

Phil Bolger has a design for small and simple "shanty boat". There are pictures here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Bolger2/ (You probably have to join, but it's free.) Look in the photos section under 'houseboat.'

[Sean Herron]

Hello...

Get a house - fill it with two part foam - hang some river stones on the bottom bit - lawn chairs on the top bits...

No wait - that may cause legal problems...

Or - figure out what you think you want to displace - how much the build will weigh - and go make some pontoons with pointy ends and hang outboards - once you have the 'raft' you can frame to your hearts desire...

If you are interested in keeping the brain tickled - goto www.carlsondesign.com and download his free 'hulls' program and start blasting out some pontoon hulls with mostly constant sections and play with the displacements - shame I lost all my old stuff on a hard drive crash - I had a great little cat houseboat at 19 feet...


SH.