Solar Powered Electric Boat!! (Part 1)

oh i have a boat i've always wanted to build a little small electric craft because i've seen tons of these cool mini boats you can see here but unfortunately the mini boats were a little bit too small so i wanted to build something a little bit bigger so i took my family and my fur child so we got this it used to be a john boat but anyways let's go back a few weeks the very first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna rip this thing apart it is an absolute mess but hey we gotta start somewhere and the best thing to do with this is simply just tear it all apart and see what we got to work with now what's really cool is this is a 1957 crestliner i always wanted the kind of vintage boat but man this thing is definitely vintage but without all the cool features that go with the vintage boat but i'm going to make this into something that i've always kind of wanted i've always wanted one of those old kind of like 1930s 40s wooden mahogany runabouts and obviously i could never really afford that and i'm not really sure what i would even do with it because it'd be so fancy and nice that i'd probably break it so i'm going to make this thing into what i want which is a fun little kind of electric runabout thing so we're going to continue to strip this thing apart and let's see what's underneath all of this [Music] so it's been about a full day and we've taken the boat apart one day so i'd say things are going along pretty well because i have to get this thing done in a month [Music] and now it's complete completely torn apart with the boat finally torn apart we can actually start the actual building process now i have a few choices i can do i can either paint over this terrible looking blue paint and move on with my life or i could strip it down and do it the right way i really regret my decisions right now i should have just painted over it i'm not worried about it but no we gotta strip it down to the bare metals make it look good with the gross paint off the boat it's now time to try sandblasting some of the gritty knitty bits of the bow we turn on that side and simply just start blasting it i don't really know how well this really worked i think an angle grinder might work better but anyways we're gonna continue to stand this thing up and move on with our lives with the last bit of sanding done it is now time to actually begin painting so what i want to first do is use this total boat aluminum etching paint to make the primer stick really good to the boat and it's very shiny now and i can finally rest easily knowing that it is stripped down to the bare bones and we can move on with the two-part epoxy primer wow look at this stuff total for epoxy preserved your insides now this part we're using this total boat epoxy primer i'm just going to mix it up and simply lather it up and slap it on and start building up some coats also mega thanks to total boat for sending me all this stuff they really helped me get this boat to the water and make it look great now with the epoxy primer mixed up we can simply go and lather it on and cover up all the bare aluminum in hindsight i actually brushed it on but i think i probably should have rolled it anyways we're gonna have to continue on because i've already started this and i'm gonna scrape some of the high parts off this is a little bit of my own error i really should have rolled it on but a little bit of sanding will fix [Music] this now this is very fun i have to draw the water line somewhere on the boat now i'm kind of guessing to where the boat would float but i saw this tips from the channel called tips from a shipwright and he was showing you how he marked the water line and i'm like huh with some string i guess that's one way to do it i could have put the boat in the water to do it but hey we just did it this way now it's time to brush on the total boat wet edge paint and man this stuff looks great but my undercoat looks terrible with the um primer the way it is so we simply just brushed on a few layers and then uh yeah it actually looks alright and i'm fairly happy with it while the paint is drying i'm actually going to begin the roof of the boat we gotta have to put the solar panels on so i'm gonna bend some of this wood taking a look at it oh that's way pliable just about 30 more minutes on this piece as you can see i'm going to bend some wood for the cover of the boat we're going to bend some of the formers because we want this to be nice and round for a good um look so i googled around a little bit you know how you have been seen and let me do this channel called tips from a shipwright and now we have a steam vendor but one of the things you got to do is have a small amount of water in this thing you want to be able to boil and boil off quickly so you have to keep just a small amount of water in the base and i have to constantly keep checking this and i have no idea how much water is in here there's not really a good way to do it so what you do is you blow bubbles when the bubbles stop that's how much water is in here just that much that's really cool you never know what you learn on the internet you learn all sorts of things that's from a channel called tips from a shipwright other than that we got this piece of aluminum here in this boiling thing and we're gonna bend this piece of white oak to make the little former so i gotta do three of them and then we're gonna make the wooden roof this is all extremely excessive for this because this could have been a simple solar boat project i could literally just take panels to a a board and then call it a day but i want it to look nice all right let's get the wood out of here and now we wait we're gonna have a solid base to put these panels on because i'm going to tear this thing all over the place so actually i'm going to fiberglass over this uh stripped roof that i put together this will give us an excellent sturdy base to mount the panels to and i shouldn't have to worry about highway speeds really messing with this thing or messing anything up [Music] mixing the epoxy is very easy i actually really enjoy working with the total build system stuff i work with fire glass before and i really really hate it but this was fairly enjoyed to work with i didn't get too itchy because i also didn't have to do much prep work because i'm literally just laying on a sheet of fiberglass and coating this big old roof with it for the underside i'm actually going to leave a cool wood finish so i'm going to use some of this total boat varnish this halcyon and then cut all this wood to give it a nice glossy finish another thing about this built project is i'm also trying to reuse as many of the old pieces from the boat as possible this side piece of the boat is actually mahogany uh thanks to xylo for telling me that i didn't actually know much about wood and she actually id the stuff for me and help me out figure out what kind of what i was really working with [Music] so i'm putting the boat back together with the old wood pieces i'm finally glad to actually be reassembling something rather than just tearing everything apart and having to clean everything because that that's definitely no fun it's more fun to see your projects go together for [Music] [Music] sure and now it's time to start working on the front deck of the boat [Music] for the front of the boat i consulted some help from one of my boat building friends xyla foxlin you can check out her channel here she's built an excellent cedar strip canoe i've gone back and forth with her and we've kind of discussed ways to do this thing and i settled on the easiest way which is simply glue some marine grade plywood down and then simply coat it with the mahogany veneer it's cheating it's not exactly like you'd plank a normal boat but hey i can get this done pretty easily and honestly i have no way of really ripping down the mahogany into these little thin strips so a veneer is probably the easiest quickest solution that i could muster up and get down to the boat so we can you know do both things i'm really trying to get like the aesthetic of the old vintage mahogany boats as you can probably tell so with this stuff it's actually peel and stick uh veneer and i'm not really sure how this is going to hold up so this is definitely an experiment but this is all the wood store had and i had to get this thing done like i said i'm on a timeline so we have to complete this project now the fun thing is they actually ran out of the back of the sticky stuff so i had to go to the paperback veneer and put adhesive on that and slap it out so we got half 3m adhesive half contact cement and man i don't know if this is going to hold up but hey we're going to continue on now i'm going to actually start putting down the total boat epoxy wood sealer because i'm thinking this is going to help glue every last bit of this stuff down to make sure we got a good bond and this thing doesn't delaminate hey it could all delay in the future who knows and i have to maybe come back and redo all of it but it's looking good and i'm very happy with it so far with the epoxy sealer on and dried up i'm actually going to start using the total boat epoxy again but this time with the white pigment and then fill in all these lines to give me these cool white boat stripes now i've seen tons of ways people do these and i don't really know what's the best way to do it but this is the way i'm going to do it because every hipster on the internet fills wood with epoxy does all these fancy little art projects so we're going to try it out with the white fill drying it's time to move on to something else we're going to start working on the running hardware to get this boat into the water i got to get some seat trowels underway real soon so we're going to grind these and weld them up for the rudders we're actually going to paint them now because i'm going to install them and i figured hey why don't we try some of this krypton ablative paint from total boat it looks pretty good it's red and i'm not really sure why i'm choosing to use the blade of paint i could have just used normal red glossy paint because this thing ain't living in the water but hey it looks cool since i'll be making holes in the boat i've got to figure out a very sturdy way to actually mount the motors so i got sam to laser cut some of these pieces we're going to install all this inside the boat we're doing inboard drives which is very weird for a 14 foot john boat i don't think i've seen an inboard it's not even a stern drive at this point it's actually just a straight up inboard motor although it's not even like an inboard with like a shaft the motors are actually just trolling motors permanently mounted at the bottom of the boat with these fixtures in place i can go and drill them caulk them and i hope these things really don't leak because i'm now drilling holes into this old what is a 70 year old boat 1957 it's 20 21 wow the years really do go by after filling these holes with marine grease because i'm going to install the rudders i really don't want water to come up through here and most importantly salt water is going to be in this environment so i have no idea how corrosive that's going to be which is probably very corrosive so i don't have to do much my boat maintenance for the boat i'm going to be steering it from the helm so i'm going to install a steering wheel i'm actually going to use a system of ropes and pulleys and simply steer the boat from the helm rather than steering from an outboard because we don't have an outboard anymore for the propulsion i'm using these three horsepower hospital and trolling motors i have to cut the shaft down to make it fit inside the boat because i want this obnoxious large trolling motor i have no idea how long this thing is going to last in the water but hey we're going to try figuring out and see a permanent underwater motor solution the reason why these things are staying under water is because i'm not using it in a normal trolling fashion since they're fastened to the bottom of the boat i can't exactly tip them out of the water like you would on a normal dinghy or something like that so these are going to be underwater full time at least when the boat is in the water so before we get down to the lake and do our first sea trials i'm going to finish up some odds and ends because i really want the windscreen on the boat because it really does complete the look of the thing all right the moment of truth are you ready for some sparks now we come to switch and we just set it to one because i'm just testing one of the motors right now how these trolling motors work is they read uh resistance from the potentiometer it's looking for the resistance value so i have to kind of redo this thing because right now there's no way to actually position it where it needs to be it's mostly here's the middle put it in the middle but let's see if it starts hang on [Music] all right well that works now it is time for sea trials let's pack up some tools and uh let's head to the lake all right well um we do need to measure wattage for the lake um i think i might need this allen wrench in case length goes wrong always a good idea to pack tools to the lake wait a second i think it's something better than this thanks to bespoke post for sponsoring this video so this bag not really that magical but it's pretty amazing because it came from bespoke post bespoke post is a monthly membership club that sends you something really cool every month they have a bunch of cool brands to work with and they curate these boxes to send to you so the best thing about bespoke post is you followed the custom questionnaire to your tastes and then every month they send you a list of what they could possibly send you and you can either say yes or no and if you decide not to get the box that's totally cool too you can skip it and move on to the next month we have something else exciting that you can possibly see every box is at least 70 worth of goods in it but the subscription is only 45 so based on the preferences i selected they sent me this really cool survival box with the surviving great outdoors field manual on it a knife and some paracord now that was really exciting i actually really enjoy the goods inside of it so one of the neat things about bespoke posts just the variety of things they can send you so the next one really caught my attention it's called shucked and i'm like they're gonna send me live oysters through the mail so that's exactly what i got i got some live oysters through the mail bespoke one she had really cool experiences so i took my family out on the boat and then we ate the oysters on the boat we catching this for today yeah you counted out the mailbox thanks to the bespoke post say thanks to buzzfeed thank you bespoke post can you say that bespoke post what so what are you waiting for head over to bespokepost.com and use the promo code triple 20 and save up to 20 off on your first box [Music] uh [Music] so the boat is definitely on the water and man and i sort of impressed and sort of disappointed because obviously this is going to be solar boat and it's not very quick but hey we're going to work on the pitch of the props sometimes later and try to get a little more top end out of this thing but for the most part i'm just doing some quick checks today i'm really making sure nothing is leaking and so far i can't see any leaks in the boat and i'm also doing some watt meter checking to see what kind of current we're pulling and surprisingly moving very slow at around like three to four miles an hour we're only pulling maybe 30 amps five miles an hour four miles an hour but the funny thing is if i go up to like four or five miles an hour i push at 30 to 80 because of uh the return of investment for power put into this thing it's really not that great [Music] but moving around the boat i'm actually fairly happy with most of the things it feels very stable even with this wood roof there's so much room in here it's so comfortable to hold although the wood roof is at the very bottom position this thing is actually adjustable i can raise it for taller people because i'm fairly short and so is my mom and dad they seem to be enjoying it but anyways let's get this thing back to the dock and back to the shop [Music] all right well we're back from the lake and the boat has actually a little more work on it because i'm scrambling to get this thing done as you notice there's still no solar panels on it we're getting to that trust me it's going to be worth it it's going to be cool because i'm actually headed to florida the next month and i'm actually going to be taking the rest of my friends out and we'll be screwing around the boat doing all sorts of solar things out in the sun and i'm going to you know be driving this thing all over so look forward to that i'm actually going to be adjusting the props and the pitch and playing with all that because i got some cool things going on there plus we're gonna do some real sea trials because it's going to the gulf of mexico maybe not in the gulf of mexico but near the gulf of mexico because they'll be playing in the water anyways i'm very happy with the boat so far it's actually me most of my expectations for what i would want out of the boat obviously i wouldn't want more speed but hey the faster you go the more power you pull and the less efficient a solar boat becomes because right now it's literally just a battery boat that has to run for a very long time all through the water so look forward to part two on top of that in the solar panels we're gonna add a bunch of lights some other cool things all the rest of the wood stain and make this thing look really pretty because i really want a nice boat to dry around something you know it's kind of like mine so we're gonna make this thing look really cool really nice and i'm going to enjoy it all summer and you'll see part two maybe part of three maybe you're part four maybe your part who cares because i sold the boat because someone really wanted it although i don't really want to sell the boat because it looks really nice so yeah make sure you subscribe for that i'll see you in one month whoa what is that i don't get it oh my god how do you know florida

Channel: PeterSripol

Views: 1,542,372

Rating: 4.8978195 out of 5

Keywords: solar boat, miniboat, electric, diy boat, mini, boat, trolling motor

Id: _n-8dYlqV0s

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021