Drift boat build

Sorry about the lag between posts. Wife wanted the bathroom remodeled, so my boat build took a bit of a back seat over the winter.

I was able to get the bottom coating applied a couple weeks ago. The stuff takes a long time to cure. But wow! This is some slippery coating! Its amazingly hard as well. It is specifically designed to glide over river rocks. I can't believe I didn't take any pics of it while the boat was upside down. Oops.

 

I thought long and hard on what I wanted to do for the outside finish. This boat is meant to be beat up and abused. I figured a fancy paint job would only make me want to baby the thing.

I ended up using Scotch Brite polishing pads to make the swirl pattern. This worked great in my humble opinion. The swirl hides lots of imperfections...almost all imperfections. I couldn't hide the side panel seam completely.

In case any one is wondering about the bent up thigh brace, yeah, I fucked up.

I had the boat upside down on the trailer and was lifting it up to roll out the trailer. The anchor rope was wrapped around the thigh brace and the loose end was under one of the tires. I can fix it.

 

Just found my thread, did ya?

 

What’s the update since June?

 

Hardly anything. I work tons of OT during the summer. No real time mess with it.

 

Just stumbled onto this... Beautiful work. I live in northern Ohio near steelhead alley... Ohio law is really screwed up. If you are floating on the water, you aren't trespassing. If you are wading in the water you are breaking the law. I fish out of an old Grumman sport boat that we restored. This is very tempting. Amazing skill set you have sir! I am fearless with steel but I always shy away from aluminum.

 

I worried about burn thru, so I opted to use 1/8" for everything. Calculations showed that would add 70 lbs. I was worried that it would be a heavy pig. It's just the oposite. It is very easy to handle.

If you can MIG weld iron, you can MIG weld aluminum. It was a very fun project. I hope to do it again.

Building it out af aluminum is 5 times faster than using wood.

 

You are talented OP. I remember taking sheet metal in school and were given wooden dowels placed in the drill chuck and it would make swirls similar to yours, I would like to see more pictures on the water. Very cool and thanks for sharing
P.S. I know this is a older thread, so I don’t need comments about that..lol
I am still trying to catch up on different threads

 

No worries.

I actually have it up for sale. I want to build another one because this was so much fun!

 

neat-o!

 

Freaking love this boat build! This would be awesome to have for fishing the shallows where I like to catch big catfish

 

It's for sale. Buy it already

 

Moar pics.

 

Nice looking boat
thanks for posting the project

 

WOW she's beautiful looks very seaworthy as well

 

nice looking country over there

 

did you line your boat with anything to dampen the noise? I imagine it would be similar to an aluminum canoe and reverberating along the river. Nice build, below is my stealth floater....really want a drift boat, but like you said, even a used one is 4-6k

 

I never got around to doing that.

I actually bought a bunch of those interlocking weight room padded tiles to put on the floor. It was more for cold insulation than sound insulation.

As of present, I didn't think it was that noisy with just a top coating with traction grit.

 

First off, this is a fantastic thread. You put in a lot of hard work and I think your boat looks amazing for doing it all from scratch! Just spent an hour reading through it. I live on the river your boat design originated on (the McKenzie). In our neighboring city we have drift boat art all over the place. I imagine there aren't many drift boats up in Michigan? I've owned wood and aluminum and have to say you made a good choice going with aluminum.

Relevant to your last comment: Out west we don't do anything to quiet our aluminum drifters. All of the local manufactures I know have tried and tried, but it's the way of the beast. If you find something I'd recommend licensing it to Willie Boats, Pavati, or Koffler and become a rich man. We clang and bounce off rocks all the time and it's just the nature of owning an aluminum drift boat. Aluminum drifters didn't catch on for a while because of peoples hatred for the noise.

You can put UHMW on the bottom and that quiets it a little bit, but standard coatings (like coat-it or glove-it) won't do really anything. One thing I just picked up are some PRO-LOKS oar locks. They fit on my Sawyers and make it so that there's no "play" between the oar and the oar lock. On an aluminum boat, just about every time you pull on the oars you'll hear a "bang" because of this "play", but the PRO-LOKS are fit to your oars and quiet the boat down significantly. The only clanging you will hear is from the boat hitting bottom. If you're ever around central OR give me a shout I'll put you on the front of my boat.