survival raft

[adalel]

Anyone here ever thought about making a survival raft out of foraged discarded plastic bottles with a wood frame on top of them. The bottle necks could possibly be tied together with cordage and would provide a lot of bouyancy for a raft. The bottles would have to have their caps and not have any holes in them. What do you guys think?

[doug1980]

Well you would probably need quite a few to actually make a difference. And hopefully in this case there will be enough laying around in the wilderness you're in. However I doubt it.

[Gray Wolf]

I saw a show on the Science Channel where they did that, and it worked well.

[crashdive123]

It should work just fine.

[rockymtnchief]

When I was a kid I made one out of plastic milk jugs. Turn them upside down, band them together, and put plywood on top. It wasn't anything you could take from lake to lake since it loses its shape. But it worked darn good for us for a couple weeks.

[DOGMAN]

I've built similar styled rafts out of 18 wheeler inner tubes, then covered with a log frame. Also, seen a really neat raft built out of 50 gallon plastic barrels all lashed together than covered with 2x4's, then topped with a small wall tent. It was super cool until it wrapped around a bridge!

[rockymtnchief]

When I was around 10-11 years old I saw a "raft" built out of 50 gallon barrels. I decided to push it out into the lake to see if it floated. About the time it got to the middle of the lake my step-dad informed me that I just pushed the DOCK out into the lake.

[adalel]

Don't know how this would work but if you found enough aluminum cans and turned them upside down and lashed them together somehow that might work too.

[primeelite]

Yeah the tough thing is in a survival situation it is always tough to find all of those things to make your raft float, you may have 4-5 bottles to use but not the 20-30 needed.

[trax]

flotation is when the object floating has lower density than the material being floated upon. so....if you spread your flotation devices out and lash them together, placing your body on top of the device displaces your density over the device (vis:raft) If you're someplace where there's a whole whack of empty milk jugs or oil drums or whatever, good on ya! If you're someplace where there's enough of a body of water that you need to transverse it, you're probably surrounded by trees. Wood's fibrous construct generally makes it's density lower than the volume of water it is displacing. If you didn't bring anything to cut the trees with, well you probably should have stayed home anyway, but....one or two deadfalls and some paracord will make a raft if you're talking fairly calm water. I don't recommend trying to run rapids with the same, nor do I recommend it with rafts made out of beer cans or milk jugs.

[erunkiswldrnssurvival]

For one man to cross a lake , river, or flooded bog, A Coricle made of bundled reeds, tall grass,or branches is enough to do the job.

[klkak]

Anyone here ever thought about making a survival raft out of foraged discarded plastic bottles with a wood frame on top of them. The bottle necks could possibly be tied together with cordage and would provide a lot of bouyancy for a raft. The bottles would have to have their caps and not have any holes in them. What do you guys think?

I think it would work great if say you were stranded in a land fill with a river running through it.

[klkak]

For one man to cross a lake , river, or flooded bog, A Coricle made of bundled reeds, tall grass,or branches is enough to do the job.

Might you be refering to:

1. Coracle. A small round boat made from animal skins stretched over a wicker frame.

The structure is made of a framework of split and interwoven willow rods, tied with willow bark. The outer layer was originally an animal skin such as horse or bullock hide (corium), with a thin layer of tar to make it fully water proof - today replaced by tarred calico or canvas, or simply fibreglass. The structure has a keel-less, flat bottom to evenly spread the weight of the boat and its load across the structure and to reduce the required depth of water - often to only a few inches, making it ideal for use on rivers.

[trax]

I do believe that is what he was referring to,and personally, I don't want my famous last words to be "glub, glub, sputter, glub, glub, glub"

[klkak]

gulp splash splash gulp what splash splash did gulp gulp you splash splash say burbble burbble burbble.....................,

[Badawg]

I made one out of 35 gallon barrels with a 2x4 and plywood frame and dropped a Mercury 50 HP motor on it for a Colorado River float trip with a scouting group. It was our freighter and sag-wagon. At the end of the trip we burned the wood and took the barrels home.

[crashdive123]

Don't know how this would work but if you found enough aluminum cans and turned them upside down and lashed them together somehow that might work too.

While it may work, I'm not sure how reliable it would be. With the cans being such a shallow vessel, any wave action or turbulence could force water into the open cans. Also the small size of each can is not going to add a lot of bouyancy (it'll take a lot of cans).