Can a Stuffed Toy Frog Row a Boat on Water? Updated Video.

Updated Video 06.08.2024 We proved that Frogs aren't meant to row boats, but after adding a simple on off switch the Frog performed well on dry land, we had a lot of fun making this Instructable, thanks for looking in.

The Idea for my very tongue in cheek Funny Frog rower came from 2 sources, one being Tales from the River bank albeit the animals were in a speedboat and the other being the man rowing a boat whirligig.

The Whirligig man rowing a boat has always appealed to me but why have it in motion just when it's windy, why not attach a motor to it and see if it can actually row in water? that's the idea, would it work or not, let's find out.

I wanted an easy way of making such a thing and decided on the very popular and cheap, Yellow TT DC motor which has dual output shafts which is just what we need for propelling the boat.

I was going to design and 3D print a body for the rower but I thought an animal of some kind would be more funny and I saw this Fat frog for very little money on Amazon.

First of all we need a boat, the best and only option I have for a boat is to Design and 3D Print one.

3D Printer

ABS and Pet-G Filament

Yellow 3v -12v DC Motor twin output shaft.

Solder

Soldering Iron

3 x 1.5v AAA Battery Pack with on/off switch.

Stuffed Frog or something similar.

4mm Brass Rod

CA Glue and Accelerator.

I will use Fusion 360 for my simple Dinghy design and to start off I will create a new component and then create a sketch using the top plane, my printer can handle dimensions up to 236 x 236 x 236mm so I opted for a length initially of 180mm so a central line of 180mm was sketched, and the next part was to sketch a simple shape of half a boat using the fit point spline tool, when I was happy with the shape i created another line for the stern of the boat, this once again was sketched to the centre line, we can now mirror the boat shape using the mirror tool and once our lines are selected we can use the centre line for our mirror line, this line could have been a construction line but I deleted it after the mirror, finish sketch and we can now create an off set plane of 65mm in this case and then use this plane as the next new sketch and from this sketch we can project the bottom outline of the boat and offset the sides to whatever size you want, i didn't include the stern line as I wanted to keep this flat so to speak, sketch a line for the stern using the original stern line as a guide and trim the off set ends of the sides.

We can now use the loft tool, select the bottom sketch and then the top sketch and you will have a solid boat, use the shell tool to create the thickness of the sides and back of boat you want, I went for 3mm.

To make it look more like a dinghy shape, I created a new sketch and selected the centre plane to draw a curved line from bow to stern and then using the split body tool, select the boat body and use the line as the tool to split the body. and there we have our boat shape, encompass the whole body using the left mouse button and then fillet the entire boat to 2mm to round the edges etc.

With the Dinghy sorted its time to move on the rowing action.

It was apparent at the time of matching the Fat Frog to the first 3D printed dinghy, to quote a "Jaws" phrase, we are going to need a bigger boat! so I scaled it up in the 3D Print slicer, it's still hardly big enough but it makes me smile, Pea on drum scenario springs to mind.

I've added the dinghy file un-scaled, scale as big as you want.

Nothing to hard with this part of the design, I'm going to use one of those very common yellow 3-12v dc motor, the majority have a dual shaft output, I will power this using 3 x 1.5v AAA batteries in a case with an on/off switch, the triple A are the smaller batteries and its the only case I have to hand.

To accommodate the motor I designed a turret style arrangement, there is a recess in the bottom for the battery cable to come through, and these in turn will be soldered to the terminals on the dc motor, it doesn't matter about polarity as we can rotate the motor in the housing, there is a slot on each side of the turret for the motor output shafts, I also designed a top for the turret to finish off.

The crank handle set are 3D printed and as such they are firstly secured with CA Glue onto the motor output shaft, I set these dead upright, the joints are designed to accept 4mm brass hollow tubing as it's all I had to hand, and to this end there are 2 right angle joints which will bring out the tube horizontally these are for the hands of the frog to mimic a rowing action, then at the end of these tubes are degree joints, these are for the oars to fasten into and do away with the need for rowlocks.

The battery box and Motor housing are secured in the boat with double sided tape, the frog is also held in position with double sided tape onto the top of the battery box, sliding the frog back it releases the battery box for battery changes.

The next job is to prepare the frog for the crank handle.

This part of the project is we we prepare the frog so he looks as though he's rowing the boat via the crank handles and initially I was going to 3D print some sleeves to secure to his hands, but they were at the wrong angle so I opted for making a hole through each of his hands, I very carefully used a small screw driver to make holes through each hand and pulled a bit of the stuffing out as well as this frog has fat hands, the brass rod can now be pushed though each hand and the an angle at each side the hands are going nowhere.

The last step of this project is to make some oars, I designed 2 oar shaped paddle arrangements with a 4mm circular off set sleeve going into and out of the paddle, we can then insert the 4mm tube into both the oar and the offset angle to create our paddles, these components are all secured with CA glue.

Well what can I say, the first attempt at Frog rowing the boat failed miserably but good fun all the same, it was initial pilot error which doomed the frog, we managed to float his boat with the aid of some coinage ballast, but that unfortunately ended up at the bottom of the bath after I realized he was rowing the wrong way, all was lost at this point as everything including the frog was water-logged, and we lost an oar! He did float for a while though which was promising

We live to try another day as I'm convinced that frog will row the boat but we ran out of time for today....To be continued, Thanks for Looking.