Reclaimed Wooden Boat Parade Car

we build a parade car for the annual carnaval in belgium (knokke-heist). now, we couldn't just build whatever we wanted or use any material we wanted. remeber the life-size ark we build:

https://www.instructables.com/id/Noahs-Ark-1/

well we had to use the materials we salvaged from that build to make the wooden boat parade car. so for the exterior of the boat we used thermowood sidings and the beamstructures from the Ark were used the make the structure of the boat.

the whole boat can be lit up at night because we integrated some led lighting in the boat.

I started by sketching out the possible boat in sketch up to see what the possibilities were to make the boat look like an old fishing ship (which is what we had to make it look like). the most difficult step was going to be the sides of the boat because they had to go outwards a bit..

we got a new flat bed trailer (6 meters long, 2.45 meters wide) to mount our boat onto. we started by building the steering hut and the railing. these structures were bolted onto the chassis. we had to weld an additional traingle brace onto the front of the trailer to make the shape of the boat come out better.

next, we finished all the structural framing to make up the shape of the boat.

the heigt of the railing is about 1.10 meter. the curved sides were made by joining four wooden beams and drawing the curve onto the joined beams, then taking it the the bandsaw and cutting out 1 template, we the used that on template to route the remaining curved beams so we had consitant and identical parts all the way round the boat.

we began putting up the sidings which - on the long sections was an easy task. the front of boat however is a painstaking task. we put a laser along the middle of the curved beams and had to cut each piece of siding to several differtent angels (=mostly double bevel cuts...) to make everthing fit nicely together.

we also waterproofed the floor of the boat by laying down some protection flooring before laying down the finishing wooden floor.

all said and done we finshed the siding of the whole boat, this took it's sweet time but the result was liked by all.

in the steering hut we cut out some round shapes and made windows out of those. we also added a door in the back and a "boat" door to gain acces to the deck.

we also finished the boat deck by laying down some wooden decking. the nose of the boat was also finished on the inside. this was the same proces as on the outside of the boat when we finished the sidings. measuring each piece and mostly double-bevel cuts to make everything fit seamlessly.

we added even more trimming

the little man on the sides is the symbol of the local carnaval, we made this out of plywood cutouts which we stacked on each other to give something extra instead of one cutout and the painting it...

we then "aged" all the wood by appying some teak washing and grey washing, the WHOLE boat was the varnished with an 2-component heavy duty matt varnish to keep it safe from the elements.

the whole boat weighs in at about 5700kg, with the flat bed trailer itself weighing about 2000kg so the boat itself weighs about 2700kg.

it worked perfectly in 3 parades so far!