Super Boats

I usually tinkered with dynamos and used them as electric motors. I’d connect them to a battery and be amazed at how they’d spring to life. One day, I wanted to make a boat since I didn’t have much to do and since there were many places filled with water in my yard. This turned out to be a great idea and the boats looked really amazing in the end. My cousins were completely into this boat-making activity shortly after too. Take a look at the pictures below to get an idea of what our homemade boats looked like. The one on the pictures was the best I ever made and was my favourite.

Front view of my Boat Rear view of my Boat

Construction

The body of most boats were made up of plastic. Initially I tried to use paper or cardboard but my boats sank miserably. There were small boxes made of plastic that stored butter, but those were not quite elegant. I finally got my hands over some decent plastic boxes that previously served as recipents for dry fruits. These rectangular boxes were closed at the top.

Any number of masts and sails could be added to the boats. I used coconut broom sticks as masts and big rectangular pieces of paper as sails. A little hole was made through the top part of the plastic box and the masts were fixed in place using modelling clay. I tried adding a dynamo in the plastic box to use it as the boat’s motor but there were a number of unconveniences. Firstly, it made the boat heavier and thus, a little more unstable on water. Then, a hole had to be made so that the dynamo could actually be useful. Quite often, water would enter the plastic box and I didn’t really want my dynamo setup to get in contact with water. Further adding my problems, one dynamo wasn’t enough as using just one would just rotate the boat and the latter wouldn’t really move forward. As the mass of the boat was increasing and water was ruining my setup, I decided to stop using dynamos but it remained a configuration option in Kishan’s Shop for boats.

Finally, items could be added or modified to a boat to make it look better. Rubber bands were usually added to the body of the boat and drawings were made on the sails but there was one thing that me and my cousins loved to attach to our boats; nitrous, which were basically small firecrackers.

Small fun race

I didn’t really ignite the firecrackers that I put on my boats. Actually, I used my boats as less often as I could because I wanted to keep them in a good condition for a very long time. One day, the 2 cousins that I usually did bicycle races with, prepared for a boat race. They took a big basin and filled it with water. Their boats had firecrackers too. The winner was the owner of the boat who reached the other end of the basin first. The countdown started and one of the two ignited the firecrackers on his boat. It was actually the first time nitrous was being used on a boat we made. With a big splash of water, the boat which had its firecrackers ignited rushed forward and reached the end of the basin in no time at all. Unfortunately, the boat was practically destroyed and the basin had a crack but it was a really good souvenir and was probably worth it.