Building an 8 foot wooden Jon Boat

Uncle Bryan, I Wanna Build A Boat.

 

Those were the words of my little nephew and they were logical enough, given the circumstances. We had been watching videos about building a boat at home and talking about it for a few days. And it seemed pretty simple. So why not?

Why not indeed. So we did. Or at least we started. And we immediately ran into problems.

It was about three weeks until Christmas when we started this process. And it was cold outside. We have a shop building with a homemade wood stove in it but it wouldn't stay very warm at night. And I think that glue needs to have a fairly stable temperature before it can set properly. And it needs to be fairly warm before you can paint also. So what were we to do?

We did the most logical thing in the world. We decided to build it in the living room.

In the living room? Are you crazy?

What is crazy about that? Most living rooms are roomy, after you push things over to the sides out of the way. And it is certainly warm enough in there. Besides that, you can go out there and look and monitor your progress very easily. Sounds like a win win situation to me. The living room it was.

I had been watching videos on the Internet and this boat right here is about as simple as you can get. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY2YuO_BD1c&feature=related

And here is a good video about building a john boat.  This is kind of what we wanted.

　
　http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHvyUkTTsLM&feature=related

　
　
But I wanted the bottom of it to be a little more curved up at the front. So I searched all over the Internet for free boat plans and located lots of them. I studied them closely and printed out a couple of sets of them that I thought would be useful. Then I sort of combined a lot of different ideas from different ones and came up with my own design. Then it was time to construct.

We were going to build a john boat. And I wanted it to resemble this one, just a slightly smaller version.
　
　
　http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diGR0PiciNs&feature=related
　
　
And since it was our first boat, we decided to build a small one, just in case we messed it up it wouldn't cost very much. So we got a couple sheets of 3/8 inch plywood and some one by two's and got busy. The first thing we had to do was to put an arch in the plywood and the one by twos. The one by twos were going to be our frame and the plywood bottom and sides would be screwed directly to them. So we soaked our framework in water for a couple of days, propped up one end of them, then set something heavy on them to bend them. And we did the plywood at the same time.
　

　
　
　
Then we let it sit for about a week.
　

This is part one of a multi step process. Stay tuned for the rest.