Cradles

When I first acquired my boat, it came with a couple of hull cradles made from some layers of foam wrapped in taped. These lasted a while, but they began to fall apart, and furthermore at only a few inches thick, they had a tendency to fold over and the hulls would come dangerously close to the ground. After some searching, I found this foam online:

http://sweetcomposites.com/Minicel.html

Minicel is a fairly dense foam which does not absorb water, so it is useful around boats. I ordered a "half bun" (I have no idea what a bun is) of 3" for just over $50, and the shipping was pretty reasonable, if I recall. Ideally I would have used a hot wire or something to cut it a little better, but I didn't have one and instead used an old steak knife. Aside from making a huge mess of static-clinging black foam bits, it worked pretty well. I also had to sand the surface of the cut a bit, as the steak knife left it pretty rough. I wanted to make them thicker than 3", though, so I ended up making two pieces for each side and gluing them together with my favorite adhesive:

Loctite PL Premium Polyurethane Adhesive! I had heard that the minicell could be hard to glue, so I decided to go all out. This stuff sticks to just about anything, so if it didn't work, nothing would. And just to be safe, I wove some bungee through the two halves, which also doubles as the line to secure the cradles to the hull when moving the boat around. Here are the finished cradles:

Well, almost finished. A friend told me that rough ground surfaces could puncture and wear the minicell at the bottom of the cradles fairly quickly, and he happened to have some extra rubberized diamond plate which he used for his cradles. I cut some to cover the bottom and approximately 1" up on each of the sides, then affixed it with a good amount of adhesive. The diamond plate did not want to bend very easily, though, so I had to make this a two-step process compressing first the front and back with weights - toolboxes, etc., and then the sides as the adhesive dried. After that, they were really done! Here they are in use:

You can't really see the diamond plate, though. In fact, this picture may have been taken before I added it. Anyway, they are now in full-time use, and they work really well. I no longer keep my boat on the trailer at the yacht club, and instead rest it on these cradles and my beach wheels... but more on that in a later post on my cradle cradles. 

Total project time was about 4 hours and cost about $75, which is a lot for something so simple, but hopefully I'll get years of good use out of them!