Make Your Own PVC Kayak Boat for Around $50
|If you’ve entered an outdoors store and looked at the prices of kayaks then you know they can be extremely expensive. Some of the kayaks today sell for around $500 each and that doesn’t include shipping. But David Webster figured out a way to create a kayak from plumbing supplies that cost around $50 total.
As you can see it’s made with 2 pontoons that hold the kayak above water.
Here are the plumbing supplies you’ll need in order to build a kayak like this on your own:
- 6″ PVC Pipe (~20 feet total)
- PVC Tees to connect the two pontoons using smaller PVC Pipe
- Caps to seal pipes
- Glue to put it all together
If you’re familiar with these items this kayak can be built in an hour or less. For heavier loads you may want to get larger pontoons such as 8″. You can also use 4″ PVC but may need to double it to provide enough buoyancy.
Here is a video for the DIY PVC Kayak that you can build for less than $50
Seems legit, but I don’t think I want to take a chance with something like this. Especially if there are some alligators in the water 🙂
That sounds very unstable. A ten foot length of six inch pipe will displace just under two cubic feet, which means that it will support about 120 lbs. at the point of submergence. The “kayak” will tend to roll over easily if the user weighs more than about eighty pounds. Eight inch pipe will give you almost double (16/9) the load capacity and twelve inch pipe will support four times as much as six inch.
If you want the kayak to accommodate one adult up to 250 lbs. and be reasonably stable with that load, I would use 12 inch pipe, or use 8 inch and make it quite a bit longer.