ImechE Cardboard Boat Race 2010

This was organised to persuade people that engineering is fun. And it is! The challenge was to make a boat from cardboard, gaffa tape, varnish and sealant, within a few hours to carry two of the four team members in a 200 meter boat race.

It didn't matter that none of us were engineers, or had any experience of it, or had ever even considered designing a boat of any form....It did matter that we could swim though!

Rather than create designs in advance we prepared by having a chat about it in the car on the way to Plymouth with a bit of input from google on the iphone. the key things we discovered were that the boat must displace more water than the weight of contents of the boat. We also discovered that it was good to keep the weight relatively low in the boat to prevent it from toppling over.
Advice from googling suggested that we should refrain from folding or damaging our cardboard, we should triple layer the cardboard varnishing each side and that we should spend significant time on the folds and seals to waterproof our boat.....so that's what we did!

There were 6 teams in total and each boat was so different! When we lined up on the quay, none of the boats had been in the water and none of us really knew if they would float or sink let alone get accross a 200 meter course. And some of them did do it!....some of them didn't :-) 

Somehow, who knows how, our team managed to win the heat we were in and also the race in full! Google's advice was brilliant....but even more useful was discovering how important oars are....they experience much more stress. It would be worth focussing a lot more attention on them in the future.