| PVC Boat Shed - The chaos involved has warrented its own page ... | ||
| I am in the process of constructing a
25' x 15' boat shed out of PVC piping and joints and two rather large tarps.
Unfortunately, as I only have an escort wagon for hauling cargo, it's taking me a couple
of trips to get the various lengths of piping home. In the first load, I've got
enough for one of the two main walls, and part of the second wall. Now I just need
the remainder of the second side wall, the back wall, and the roof, oh, and some kind of
anchoring system to keep it from blowing away to oz in the first strong wind that happens
by. The neighbors are already wondering what I'm up to, since its longer than the
garage next door. The shed construction is based upon Jeff of the msn communites weekender boatbuilding site's design. His construction results in a 20'x20'x27' shed, which is more than I had room for, but the premise is the same: |
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| Here is Jeff's graphic of the shed:
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| Here is my shed construction
progress: Note: The sunfish at the far end of the picture requires major hull restoration ... that's my next project following the completion of the weekender. |
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| Shed complete, from the outside: WARNING: My original plans called for a height of 10 ' on the sides. The weight of the PVC put too much strain on the cross pieces, which failed. DESIGN NOTES: My re-designed shed is 20' long, 12' wide, by about 9' high, and seems to hold well, with reserve strength. Each of the connection corners has a carriage bolt going through the connector and pipe to ensure that they don't spin or separate, but can be easily disassembled when the boat is finished. It is an eye-sore after all. There is a doorway, closed in the front shot, which provides a 5' high by 8' wide doorway for my comings and goings, and the sides can be raised 5 feet to allow airflow while I am working. The garage seen in the photo is not mine (unfortunately), so this was almost a requirement in order to get work done on the boat with the rain we keep getting. |
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| Shed complete, from the inside:
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| Or so I thought. I arrived home from work to see the roof beams angled inward at a few points (specifically, where I had to substitute cheeper connection pieces as lowes ran out of the good ones). I added a tent like rope to the front and back to keep these angled upwards since they kept pulling towards the middle. I also flared out the back to allow some moderate ventilation as it was hotter than hades when I went into the darn thing. | ||
| Or so I thought. We've had a huge thunderstorm rip through the area today, with another tonight, and a few more over the next day or so intermittently taking their turn at knocking down my shed. Luckily, it survived the first storm ... barely, but water collected along the sides where they meet up with the roof as the tarp was way too lose. Also, the shed was composed of two tarps, one for the front, one for the back, meeting at the middle. This proved to be a bad idea, as the seem couldn't stand up to the weight of the pools of water that collected. Luckily, the boat had a back up tarp over it at that point, just in case. Anyway, this evening, I spent two more hours removing one tarp, and rotating the other 90 degrees so that it covered the roof and back as far down as the joints between the roof and side. Again, I flared out the back for further ventilation and to tighten up the tarp as much as possible, and was able to secure the tarp much better. I also used a long piece of rope anchored at the front and back of the shed, tied to each roof bracing all along the shed so that for one to tilt, all would have to so the strain is more distributed. I also added a couple of boards along the roof at dead center so that there couldn't be much sag between the supports as a means of limiting the amount of water that can pool on the tarp. It better work, as I'm all out of ideas and its raining pretty hard again. *sigh* It's dark out now, so I can't take any pictures of the new version. I will get some up tomorrow night and add them. I'll add removable side and front panels to the shed when I get the chance to pick up some grommets, and recover from all this emergency repair and reinforcement stuff. |  |
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