Monday, December 15, 2008

What can you do with a broken creeker? Ideas!

So you creek most of the year and occasionally land on a rock, piton, rock spin, boof a 20' waterfall? By any chance do you end up with a garage full of kayaks? I remember a video from the PDX Film Festival a couple years back my Mike Long in which he is picking through a stack of kayaks to figure the one he wants to take onto the L-Dub. As he grabs one out, he points out the cracks, dents and general shape of the fleet of broken boats much like the Navy does in a ship graveyard.

Only one problem. Steel ships can be stripped and melted down into the next fleet of ships. Not so with the choice of material that gets us down our favorite creeks. There are a few avenues for recycling but to the most part they are just garbage. Even many recycling programs the stuff has no end placement and makes it into the landfill anyway. I've taken that "so called" dangerous asbestos tiles my work removed, triple bagged and I took them to Metro and threw the tiles into a pit not 100 yards from the garbage you took to curb. Hmmm....

Mike Olson or commonly known as "Oly" had given me and my boys a great idea last winter when at New Years they brought out a couple snow sleds made from old creekboats. It's easy to do with a reciprocating saw or other saw.

Here's a few pics of our new Liquidlogic Chico snow sled. It was cut big enough for one or two passengers. The length so far seems to give nice speed on the test run Sunday with the recent and rare dumping of snow in the Portland area.

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Devin modeling it out.

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Devin and Ryan testing out the tandem capability.

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The sled in action at one of Devin's friends neighborhood.

Oddly enough the sled was not my priority of the use of the old Chico shell. It was to be my first attempt at a kayakers x-mas tree? What does that refer to? To me it utilized a broken creek shell, a drill. few strings of lights and a broken paddle. Hmmm... something I have a few of sitting around!! Paddle pieces taken off the river we've carried out and such. I cut the boat in two at the widest point in the midpoint of the Chico for shape and stability with the reciprocating saw, took a 1 1/4 hole saw and drilled through the nose and into the grab opening to place the paddle piece into. I trimmed the length accordingly. Next came the fun part. The lights. I didn't want to just string lights with the wire exposed around the outside. Tree limbs help with that normally so I decided to run the wires internal. Oh boy!! That required taking all the bulbs off the sockets. In this case 100 bulbs. (I was gonna do 200 but two sections of my lights didn't work out of the box so 100 worked for now) I used small style socketed lights with round bulbs for the size and so the round bulbs wouldn't fall back through the holes. 5/16 drill bit did the job.

Ryan was small enough to lay inside the nose and push the sockets into the holes so could put the bulbs on one at a time. This takes a while but it's a fun family project. You can then dress it up as much as you normally would but may need to drill a few hole to attach bulbs or strings on it. Slippery boat is good in the water, not so good to drape ornaments on! :)

Here's a few pics after dressing it a bit. I'm not 100% done yet but you get the idea. Any color would work but the white Liquidlogic plastic gives it a frosted appearance which you normally pay a lot for...

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Close of the nose. You can see the bulbs popping through the shell.

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A brighter shot to show the kayak tree as it normally looks.

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I kinda like this pic for it's night before x-mas look. I'm sure the boys wanta know where the presents are though!

If you have any other uses with pics I'd love to post them as well. I've heard of planters but have no such pics. The mailbox cover on near the White Salmon is a classic too.


cheers!