How to Build a Raft

Image Gallery NANCY WALLACE

I've always been interested in boats and sailing, so one day I built a very small raft out of scraps of wood. My father, Bob, and I put it in our VW beetle and went to a nearby lake to try it out.

We carried the raft down to the shore and set it in the shallows. It floated, but its deck stayed about six inches under the water, and the raft was hard to move. Still, it was fun to use. The other children in the lake kept trying to stand on it. Finally one of them did. I swam behind the person on the raft and wished that it was big enough for both of us to stay on.

After that day, I decided that I wanted to build a real raft that had a sail, and to use it to float down Blood Brook (a stream that's near where I live) to the Sugar River. My father discouraged me from making such a long trip, but he did say that he'd help me make a raft with a sail, and that I could use it in the Blood Brook swimming hole.

We didn't want the raft to be big or heavy, because we knew we would have to transport it to the brook and back. So my father and I decided to make the raft fairly small, and to add styrofoam to the bottom to help it float.

TWO LOGS

First we found two three-inch-thick maple logs which were lying on the forest floor but weren't rotten. We wanted to use the logs to hold the deck planks together. We measured them, and cut each one to the length of 61 inches with a handsaw. Then we pulled all the bark off.

THE DECK

The raft's deck was made from 11 planks that were called "one-inch" boards. (They were supposed to be an inch thick, but they had been shaved a little and were really only about three-quarters of an inch thick.) With my father's help, I measured and cut each one to the length of three feet.

We then placed the two maple logs two feet apart and fastened the planks to them. The nails we used were big, 3-1/2 inches long, and I'm pretty sure they'll never pull out. When we were done attaching the planks, the deck was 59 inches long (it was a little shorter than the support logs) and three feet wide.