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January 18, 2005

Racing a Cardboard Boat Against Time

Last week was a frenzy of cardboard boat construction, which mostly involved tedious measuring of regular triangles and folding. Lots of wetting of paper tape, too. As a preview of the race on Saturday, I offer you this photo essay on boatmaking.

...

Let's begin with a view down what we call "The Boatyard" -- my studio -- from my desk. It is Monday night, January 10, around 9pm. There are about seven of us there; I stopped in for an hour to do some taping.

I sit at a table with three other people: Joe, George, and Carla. Joe and George were there, working, in between bouts of talking trash to one another about their relative performance in the race. That's my desk right in front, all messy and chaotic.

One of the complications with cardboard boats is designing a way to make the cardboard more rigid, so it resists the large pressures put on it by the water. This is one system, which fails to stand up to the triangulation requirements of good structural engineering.

Most of the boats end up being a sort of canoe shape, which is pretty straightforward. My boat originally had a pointy end, but I was talked out of it by my teacher.

Some of my classmates chose to make a pontoon boat. We watched a video of previous cardboard boat races, and the pontoon boats all went down. Why this inspired them to make one, I do not know.

The basic rowboat shape is very popular, and I think will do well. I expect that this race will mostly be a rowing race, which makes me unenthusiastic. I have no chance of winning a rowing race.

The guy who made this boat made a full-sized mockup, test-ran it in Laguna Lake, and then finished his boat in a few days. He spent last week bored to death.

Now we see my own sad little boat, Number 6. It's a "modified bathtub" boat, which is very stable and relatively speedy. I expect to make it from one side to the other, but not terribly fast. I only hope one of those pontoon boats is in my heat, so people are busy watching somebody else flail and then sink.

The bottom of my boat is braced with triangles, and then I'll kneel on a cardboard plank on top of the triangles. It's a wide boat, so when the water pushes the sides in I'll still have plenty of width and stability. Or that's the theory.

I'm less enthusiastic about this than I could be, but more than I probably would be about building cardboard chairs (which they're doing in some other studios). At least my practise class doesn't have to do a set of working drawings for the boat, as the other section does.

Anyway, Sinsheimer Pool, San Luis Obispo, Saturday, January 22 from 1:30-3:30. I'm in the first heat, and I expect that's the only heat I'll be in.

Posted by ayse on 01/18/05 at 9:06 PM