Boat blind ideas?
- Thread starter D. Hinton
- Start date
roy brewington
Well-known member
Commercial blinds by Beavertail & Mud buddy work good. If you hunt with a dog you'll need to add a dog door in beavertail. If building yourself build something along lines of Mud Buddy style as its easiest to construct. The important thing on any of them is to have your brushing close in over shoot slot which is easy enough to do with either artificial or natural brushing. A product called blind grass works great as your exterior grassing. Synthetic so it doesn,t soak up water and lasts a long,long time.
If you design and build your own the design will largely be driven by your building capabilities. For example, do you have a tube bender? What are your skillset and resources? Are you more of a canvas type, wood guy, or sheet metal fabricator?
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roy brewington
Well-known member
If you build and decide to cover with Cordura Nylon Ebay is your friend. Usually there deals on there buying Cordura buy the yard. I've built several thru the years for various boats and you want someone who can sew. Fortunately I've convinced my wife to handle that area after I design and cut out patterns. Mudbuddy use to have a mounting tutorial on utube that gives some very good info on frame design if you watch carefully.
Here's my attempt at a fold down blind on my 12 ft boat. Trying to keep the cost down so I'm salvaging Stuff out of the basement and garage. I have two hub marsh blinds that I will remove the metal hub parts and attach to the horizontal poles and attach layout blind grass I have to them then throw a grass mat on the bow and stern. Once the ponds freeze up and the birds (if there are any) come back to the river I'll be ready.
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I love the beavertail. All folds to one side, so wide open to work the rig. I added webbing straps to gunnel instead of the travel cover so wraps up at the end of the day do easy.
I'd love to find a beavertail but even the used ones here are as expensive as new. For the few places I could use one I'm hard pressed to pay the price.
roy brewington
Well-known member
Check out their blind mounting tutorial on utube and it will give you some good ideas for frame and mounting design. One thing they do that I don,t do is attach bottom of blind covering to boat. I,ve found a lenght of scd. 40 1" conduit attached to bottom of wall covering the length of wall bottom will keep the blind covering taught . Using cordura for covering i,ll simply sew in a pocket at bottom and slide conduit in. If using netting simply take a wrap around it and zip tie. Let bottom of wall extend to about a 1' from water . That measurement depends on how your boat sits in water. Their blind is a fairly simple design which collapses to either sides of gunnel. You will need a conduit bender to build frame.
Ed, my hat is off to you! That's pretty ingenious but simple as well
Fred
I've made this type of blind in the past and I use a 1/2" ID pex tubing zip tied to the bottom of the material. My blind reaches the water and water in the tubing keeps the material taunt even when the wind blows.
My Lund is leaking enough now I need to run the bilge after about 4 hours of being on the water. It maybe time for a different boat. Maybe a blind to.