Does anyone have any experience of building a pontoon boat?

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Yes!  i have designed and built an all-wood pontoon boat.

 

Are you looking to build an aluminum one or one from wood?

I would like to see a picture of this , sounds interesting !

Here are some from the 2009 Wooden Boat Show in Mystic CT.  I didn't get as much finished as I had hoped, but took in All Spruced Up anyway.

Front View

Back View

 

Console

WOW! remarkable craftsmanship

I'll admit, not what I expected to see.  WOW!  nice work!

All you need now is a set of sweeps setup and you could run a whole bunch of rivers! It would be the fanciest scow ever seen!

All kidding aside the craftsmanship is wonderful and the design work is super. I am willing to bet that you suprised a few folks at Mystic too!

Rick Newman

Nice Work Rick.

Can you tell me any technical stuff about the pontoons,how they are connected to the deck,how high it floats and that kind of thing?

Seasons greetings

Thanks for the compliments.

 

The outboard hulls are strip-built with spruce, much like a canoe or kayak, except the stations used to shape the hulls were glued in place.  The center hull is cold-molded 1/8" plywood, over the stations (which were also glued in place).  The hull stations are typically 2 feet apart except near the ends where they were spaced at 1 foot.

 

Every 2 feet there are plywood-skinned trusses (2" x 7.5") that sit across all three hulls directly above the molding stations.  These are glued to the tops of the stations.  One half inch plywood gussets are glued and screwed over-lapping both the truss and the stations to futher tie the deck trusses to the hulls.  There are either 8 or 12 gussets per truss, depending on how many hulls are under each truss.  (The center hull is 7 feet shorter than the outboard hulls.)

 

The boat only drafts about 5 inches of water by itself.  Of course the more people that are on board, the deeper she sits in the water.  I have had 11 large adults on at one time for a slow trip around the lake.  It was real low that time!!!!!

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