Easiest (i.e. cheapest) way to build a raft + rafting disaster!

@Raftman- not many people copy the floating neutrinos, for the size reason, but it is a good idea to maybe base your design on one of theirs, even just loosely, particularly the Vilma B because of the fact it can be made bigger and longer continuously, and there is an infinite amount of things you can change with it.

 

I haven't changed my design since before I heard about the Neutrinos back in the 1990's. But my design is similiar in the fact it can be infinitely expandable. Mine are each 4 ft wide, 8 feet long and I can double them up for an 8x8 square, or tandem them for a 16 footer. I had three at one time, and I would double up two of them, and stick the 3rd one in the back for an 8x12. I currently only use the tandem configuration though, 4 feet wide, 16 feet long, because it's more maneuverable that way. I sit in the back with the trolling motor while my drunken friends sit in front of me on lawn chairs, always paddling the wrong way when I tell them which way we need to go when we get in rapids. As a result I've learned to build the rafts stronger.

 

Building a homemade raft cheap is simple. Just keep your eye out for anything in your surroundings that might be useful. I made one myself about a year ago. I spent the week beforehand poking around my house and the surrounding woods (where alot of my neighbors and I dump wood and scraps) and collected a lot of free stuff. I also asked friends for anything they could spare. I ended up spending under 5 dollars for the whole thing. But I must say that my experience ended in complete and utter failure, albeit a funny failure that taught me a lot about building a homemade raft

 

I've been saving 16.9 oz Dasani water bottles for about a year now. I've got several thousand of them now. The idea is to make some sort of raft that the water nazi's won't harass me for having on the river. Water nazi's are all a bunch of tree huggers, so if the raft is made of "recycled materials" I can say I made the raft for some kind of anti-capitalist political statement, blah blah blah & they will think I'm a tree hugging pansy too & let me go.

 

You drink a lot of Dasani. Maybe you would like to try Zephyrhills Bottled Water.

 

Wrap the bottles in wire netting and wire tightly, and plaster a 1 inch layer of cement over it.

If you do a good enough job, it will look like fibreglass. Might be a bit heavy so you would need a good trailer.

I met a guy building a 50ft trimaran using wire mesh embedded in fibreglass that seemed to work.

maybe the trick would be to cover the wire in foam, and lay fibreglass over it.