This is how you take 1st place in the 4th of July boat parade

[FattyBoomBatty]

The wings were pulled up to near-horizontal, of course. People were yelling, "That's the best one I've ever seen."

I was pretty proud, but it was a pain in the ass to throw together on the 3rd.

[Swifty1638]

Wow, I like that! Where was this at !? Woulda been cool to see everyone's ideas..

[TkrPerformance]

very cool

[scheides]

Nice work man!

[Matt D.]

That is awesome!

[SnoEclipse]

Would have been tres chic if you had the space vampire mathilda may on board (look it up).

But very cool

[Kracka]

Nice!

[rose0529]

Awesome! congrats

[Kevin 1G Drummer]

Haha nice! Looks like fun!

[scheides]

Tell us more about the construction! What did you use for the upright sections and what did you use to cover it all....bed sheets?

[curt_gendron]

This is an awesome float. We need more details.

later,
Curt

[123abc]

That's pretty sweet! Good job on it!

[FattyBoomBatty]

lol, I bought some 1/2" pvc tubing which we cut from 10ft down to 8ft lengths, and joined them in the middle with some slip-on pvc T fittings, the boat walls have metal uprights which we just zip tied on so as not to ruin anything. We learned a hard lesson last year when we used gaff tape and pulled off the surface layer of the vinyl seats in a couple spots.

The fin and wings were plywood, the rocket cones were three plastic garbage cans wrapped in 55 gallon trashbags to make them black, and I just used rope to tie them on, and the fabric is just the cheapest white cloth that wal-mart had. We used black paint and spray paint for the nose, windows, and letters. Disassembly took about 30 minutes since it was just snipping zip ties.

This is at Pelican Lake about 17 miles southwest of Detroit Lakes. I'll upload some more pictures and show more of the process and the final product. Last year the theme was favorite TV show and we were "Deal or No Deal." This year the theme was "Patriotic" which is super lame and doesn't give you a lot of options, realistically. Although the organizers said, "We chose this theme because it's broad and you can use your creativiy."

Well, we showed them, I guess. haha. Most others just had a bunch of flags on the boat, one team took some brown paper wrapped around their boat and wrote "Patriotic" on it. So you can tell the theme had people miffed.

[FattyBoomBatty]

In the first pic you can see the tubing, the second, you see the trash cans used as boosters, then the rest is obvious. The little kid in the first picture is my cousin from fargo, my dad's on the left and that's my friend Derek, who came up and helped out a lot with this.
btw, the wings folded up and down for trasport, so during the parade, they were down and looked normal. I haven't gotten those pics off my mom's camera yet.

[sleepydsm]

cool!!!!

[311evo]

Haha awesome!

[SnoEclipse]

I remember back in 1993 Tetra Pack built an aircraft carrier out of some 25000 milk cartons for the Aquatennial. Almost 150 people, mostly Desert Storm vets, rode the thing

[Halon]

That's awesome, good job!