This guy built a nifty kayak using forest materials and a little plastic wrap.
Everyone outdoorsman and woman should and probably wants to own a kayak. These small craft instantly give access to remote bodies of water one might not otherwise reach in their hunting, fishing, and camping adventures. However, like most pieces of outdoor gear on the market today, kayaks are not cheap, thus putting them out of reach for many average people.
Well, there are solutions to that, albeit a bit outside the box. Russian YouTuber Advoko MAKES shows in this video how he constructed a bushcraft kayak using only $1 worth of materials. His primary supplies for this build? Wood from the forest, plastic wrap, and tape.
It sounds crazy, but it is a nifty and clever design. It also appears to work well for most simple flatwater paddles. At the end of the video, he shows how to make the design a little more permanent.
This kind of stuff is why we love the Internet. There are a lot of people with incredible bushcraft skills out there who get the chance to share their talents with the world thanks to the web. Although we cannot see someone lugging a piece of industrial-strength plastic wrap far back into the wilderness with them. Still, both the plastic wrap and tarp variations of kayak are incredibly clever and well-designed.
If you truly are strapped for cash, but have some serious wood working skills, it may be a viable option. This same concept could probably be used to make a larger craft such as a canoe. The only downside we see is environmental. It takes a long time for plastic to decompose, so the best option would probably be to wrap it and then cover it with fabric and fiberglass to make something more permanent you can use for more than one season.
In any case, this was some brilliant engineering to put this build together. It just goes to show that anyone can camp or own a kayak, even without expensive gear if you have a little imagination using everyday objects around you.
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
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