boat on a budget

I am interested in building a human powered bicycle boat that is the front wheel is taken off and bolted to a piece of wood and the back wheel somehow take the rubber tire off and attach some kind of sturdy flat pieces of fiberglass or plastic at 4 points of the metal rim next attach 2 pieces of foam or even better plastic cylinder floats like the kind you may have seen while in the fishing/boating department of walmart onto the wooden deck so the platform floats then I would like to have a fishing rod holder somewhere on this wooden platform with a canopy with sides I would like to do this for under $150.00

 

Use search function

Use the search function on the right side of the blue toolbar above. There have been a number of threads on human powered boats, with a lot of interesting and useful ideas.

Good luck!

 

It's gonna take a helluva piece of wood to keep the front afloat. Here are some old ideas. The fourth one looks like it might be the simplest, with two pontoons that you could make out of huge plastic pipe.

 

Double your budget and build a decent boat.

You need two sheets of 2.4m by 1.2m, 0.8mm thick aluminium sheet. You need a good right angle drive like this:
http://www.mitrpak.com/product_datasheet.php?product_id=27
I have seen people muck around with all sorts of gearing and eventually they go for one of these boxes or something better.

I have attached the drawing of a simple hull. You need two of these to build a catamaran. It will take a weekend to build the hulls. (there are a few tricks to getting them right) I have shown the cutting plan for the ends of one hull. You will get all four ends from one sheet. Each middle section of the hulls is just under half the sheet and almost square. Each hull will weigh about 6kg. Total boat weight will be less than 20kg if you do the cross beams carefully.

The boat would be better if you sit in a recumbent position to keep centre of gravity low. Need to place the hulls about 1m apart. Just cut your bike up so you are left with the bottom bracket and two tubes for mounting it. I have attached a picture of a drive system and a video of a cat that is somewhat longer than the one proposed here. The one shown is made from irrigation pipe.

This boat will move quite easily up to about 9kph and if you are in good nick then you might run to speeds of 15kph in short burst.

Rick W.

 

Sickkk!!! Ceep Up The Good Work