Houseboat construction

Not sure what you have in mind but the nearest Shipyard oughta be able to build whatever you're willing to pay fir.

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Not sure what you have in mind but the nearest Shipyard oughta be able to build whatever you're willing to pay fir.

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We used dock floats. They are foam filled and have mounting slots on them already. You just have to get a piece of alum angle, drill hole and connect to your framing. You'll also need to get a couple of rakes made to mount on front.

Very thin metal and very susceptible to galvanic corrosion and weld cracking.

our houseboat is 60x24 and really heavy, we built it after Andrew. It floats on homemade dock boxes we built out of plywood encapsulated with mat and epoxy filled with foam, right under the wood sills.

still floating since 1993 but it’s been a lot of maintenance. In hindsight the plastic and steel frame dock boxes would have been better but obviously way more expensive

if you can swing the money I’d get a nice aluminum joisted frame fabricated and float on plastic boxes

I’ve seen scratch and dent pontoon boat ‘logs’ or whatever. Nothing is cheap done right.

Pontoon logs

I'm gonna save this thread and write a tragic song about it in 10 years

Only downside to a houseboat are the drydockings every 5 years or so. If you don’t have a way to do it yourself that’s allot of added expense. We had houseboats but we also had a shipyard and could dock them ourselves at the company’s expense. Side not we hardly every picked up private houseboats for other people due to hassle of getting paid.

ETA: I know if people that keep their’s in fresh water and have not picked them up in decades….

mike is my dad

Foam filled plastic. This company is very good and will design (quantity and size) the floats if you give them the footprint and rough weight.

LINK