The very nice people on Freegle

I mentioned earlier in this blog about putting an appeal on freegle, well, as about 90% of our materials have come from there, I thought it would be nice to put a freegle logo on the raft as a kind of thank you.
I contacted the organisers for permission to use their logo. They not only gave us permission, one of them, a lovely chap called Tom, made up some laminated signs and sent them to us.
 (Thanks Tom, they're brilliant!!)

 

For those of you who don't know about freegle, rather than try to explain, I'll point you in the direction of their main website  www.ilovefreegle.org  which explains very nicely and also helps you find a freegle group in your area.

Extending the pontoons

Up to now, we’ve only had a couple of  7 ft pontoons because of lack of material and were originally planning to stick 4 stubby bits on each end with a slight upward kick to give us a bit of a ‘shape’ to our craft. 
After lots of  consideration and offering bottles and scrap wood up to the ends of what we've already built, we decided it was too much messing about and would just add an extra 3 ft section to the end of each one.

We turned what bottles we had left into lozenges and made our 2 extra sections exactly the same way as the larger sections.

Putting all this together has now given us the basics of our two ten foot long pontoons.

It's starting to take shape!! (well, at least it's the right length now)

How we gonna hold all these together?

The plan was to hold the lozenges together between 10ft long sides as 10ft is the maximum length allowed in the raft race rules.
Unfortunately, the longest scrap ply we had for the sides of the pontoons was only a couple of inches shy of  7 feet long, so we made a start with what we had (always a problem when you’re trying to build out of scrap…especially when you havn’t actually got all your materials yet!!)

We cut our longest bits of plywood down to 200mm wide strips (to allow for 2 rows of bottles)  and marked the all important holes for the bottle caps to go through.  Then using what seemed to be my bluntest 32mm drill we drilled all the holes.
Then simply putting the ends of the lozenges through one of the sides and quite literally ‘thumping’ the other side on we had the basics of our pontoon. We held it together with some offcuts of batten and repeated the whole thing again.