The First Pontoon Boat
This is the first try at building the perfect pontoon boat. Finding the Holy Grail would be easier!
| My desire was to have fold-down oar towers. To do so I had to fabricate them first and slide them on the stock to make the side rails before I could form them. My welding wasn’t too pretty and a little grinding and file work cleaned the welds up nicely. Since these were my first efforts and looked nice I took a close-up shot of them before moving on. | |
| Pair of oar towers formed, welded, and drilled to accept oarlocks. Ready for installation on side-rail stock before bending. | |
| Oar tower mounted to side-rail stock and bending started. | |
| Pair of formed side-rails mounted to main-rails with fold-down oar towers in place. The marks are explained further below. | |
| Because I wasn’t certain of precisely where I wanted to peg the oartowers they were not pinned early on and continuously slid to a point where they were in a bind on the tubing. To free them I had to pivot them back and forth and this unfortunately gouges the soft aluminum tube. Lesson learned: Decide where you are going to mount them and do so. You can make some provision for adjustment by making alternate oarlock mounting points or just drill another pin-hole later and not worry about the initial one. | |
| Same for this side but I was learning my lessons and blocked this one more. This slide also shows that a little sanding helps but cannot eliminate deep gouges. | |
| This is a pic of the fab shop (my garage) and my equipment – Hobart welder, drill press, small welding table. By the way, I had to build the work benches and table before I could start on this so the “project” entailed rigging up a shop before I could even begin to teach myself to weld. All good wintertime fun! | |
| This is the start of one of my saddest points. As you can tell; I was almost there. But I needed to align the sides a little and started out by cutting and re-welding the cut to draw the metal at points intended to achieve alignment. This worked pretty well actually and I decided a small tap with a hammer would like take care of the final tweaking. Well, that wasn’t enough so I tapped bit harder. This ramped up until I broke the weld. Knowing I could reweld that leg I decide to go ahead and true-up one more place before tackling that. You guessed it, it gave out too soon in my estimation. And I’d just mailed my check to order my tubes the day before! 30-to-40 minutes later this was a tangled and busted mess as I decided to just find out if any of the welds were good. The others were but the damage was done. You can bet I mulled this over for more than a few hours | |