turning a school bus into a houseboat

i have an old short school bus that i wanted to turn into a houseboat. i was thinking of removing the chassis from the body and building a big platform deck, maybe 30 by 50. i don't really know if this is feasible or not, weight wise. what about 55 gal drum pontoons or tires. also docking for winter. I'm in lake champlain vermont.
please let me know what you think or if you know the formula for weight vs displacement.
thanks
adam
adamanderr@hotmail.com

 

First take the weight of ....all your stuff , the boat it's self, the bus, literally everything. Then take that weight and figure out how many cubic feet of lake water it would take to equal that weight. That will give you a volume. Multiply that by five to give you a good safety factor. Lake water is somewhere in the nightbourhood of 62.4-63 lbs/ft^3 go with the LOWER NUMBER because it forces you to use more buoyancy. Personally, I think you might have trouble with oil drums. You WILL have trouble with tires. You can make a good hull out of concrete reinforced with steel chicken wire (see ferrocement boatbuilding).

 

You might like to look at this site where someone has designed a "houseboat" to be driven by his car, Some what smaller than you are planning but they have a good concept.
http://www.dolhay.hu/offer.htm

 

Check out plastic pontoons.com. They make cool interlocking modules with bow and stern sections in three sizes. My concept is to build an outboard powered platform that my motorhome could be driven on or off of. The floating platform would pack into a trailer for land travel to the next port.

 

well that was definitely different if nothing else.However I wonder how a drop in camper made of aluminum would work on a pontoon boat , driven by a conventional o/b engine, I often thought of a pop up camper adapted to a pontoon boat,the big problem is the wood used in the frame ,most are made pretty cheeply in that area.

 

Thanks for the link, I have the feeling that the plastic pontoons are a bit small for carrying large loads, just from what I saw in the pictures , they don't seem to have enough displacement.

I certainly like your concept of drive on drive off and tow behind. I once had a large 10 mt travel crusier motor home and dearly wanted to put it on a barge and use its motor to propel, but I had nightmares of the drive mechanism seizing and the motorhome jumping out of the drive rollers and shooting off over the front of the barge in a blink of an eye.