boat blind build

J

john kuhn

Active member
hey guys, after a year and a half of chaos at work, i have finaly got back in the garage. here is a removeable aluminum blind with a drop down shooting door and a doggy door for the pooch on the front deck. it is all 1 inch aluminum tubing and will be sheethed in .060 alum. it hasnt been squared up or mounted yet so it looks a little tweeked in some spots. more pics to come.
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Looks nice I will like to see it when you put the sheething on. You bringing any boats to the Tuckerton show this year.
 
thanks chris, yep i'll have a few boats at tuckerton. i got nothing but time rite now! im working on a small 10 and a half flat bottom box rite now. its gonna resemble a small garvey when im done with it. post some pics up soon. here are some pics with some sheething on the shooting side of the blind.
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Hi John. Thats a good looking boat with what looks like high quality work, and as much as I don't want to be seen as slighting what you have there, I feel I ought to relay to you a little story about when I had a boat blind with a drop down side like that....Once upon a time, back when I had a 14 foot V bow aluminum boat, fellow board member Dave Diefenderfer and I built a blind very similiar to yours on my boat. We used wood for the frame and chicken wire with reeds for the sides, but the shape and function was the same. The maiden hunting trip with that boat blind combination was in a fairly calm piece of water on a cold blustery day. To make a long story short, the first group of birds that came in were goldeneyes, low to the water, and straight in. Picture perfect...We dropped the blind side, stood to shoot and the dog decided NOW was a good time to leap out onto the door, just as we pulled the triggers, causing his weight to act as a lever arm and roll the boat onto its side with water gushing in over the side of the boat, and Dave and I thrown into a wet camo colored ball on the floor. The dog however maintained his composure and balance and stayed out on the door, frustrating any attempt we made to right the boat. After some serious amount of screaming, the dog jumped back in a boat now with water over the floor board and everyone in it wet, and contents jumbled.

I will spare you the rest of the story about the dead goldeneyes, the broken stock and the hypothermia, and finish with a warning that a swing down blind side and an excited dog makes a dandy lever arm. Be careful out there...

John
 
in my next pics, you will see the door that will isolate the dog from being inside the blind. the bow deck is going to be where the dog will b staying and hopefuly patiently waiting! the only time the dog is actualy in the blind is when the boat is running or when he has returned with a bird. thanks for the insight though.
 
Reminiscing.... that 14ft boat was an accident waiting to happen... and often it did happen. The first design of the build was way over built for that boat.... 2x4s, and too high. Too much weight high was a disaster in the making. If I remember correctly, we cut a foot off the doors that same day when we got the boat back to my yard? I know when I transferred that concept to the 16ft wood garvey I got, it was furing strips for the frame, and much shorter!

Of coarse Onyx figured out the rules after the first season or so and became a great hunting retriever...

Scarier than the blinds we tried, was the transom! And the ice below the floor....
 
John, I like the whole doggy door partition area. Oh, and the build itself looks very clean. I can't wait to see it when its all done.

John Bourbon
 
All things considered, I can't believe we never made the front page of the local section of the paper on account of that boat. For those of you curious what it looked like, there's still pics of it kicking around this site somewhere.

John
 
thanks for the compliments guys. to attach the grass matting or rafia grass, i drill holes in the sheething and tubing and feed 1/4" shock cord or bungee cord material through the holes pulling it tight as possible as i go along. heres a pic of the flush mounted 1/4" threaded inserts for mounting the blind to the boat.
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hey mike, im doing ok. just triing to stay busy around here!i havnt made a pondbox in awhile, but i can make one up if somebody needs one. hope you and your family are doing well.
 
John, nice job on the build. I have been considering building something like this for the past year. I have been going back and forth on the materials (aluminum tube vs EMT conduit; price, weight, ability to weld, etc).

Three questions if you don't mind:
1) where are you sourcing the threaded inserts you are using in the gunwhales?
2) how high are the sides?
3) any plans for concealment overhead?

__________
 
"rivets online" carries the inserts and the tool. total package is rite around 100 bucks. the sides are 29 inches high and i use aluminum for the weight ease of wellding square tubing over round pipe and the corosion factor. i am going to be leaving the top open.
 
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