Secret History interview with Brian Schadt, City Engineer talking about…
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#Shantyboat head, including drawings by Sasha and Maxine, men’s and…
Found donut in Davenport Iowa. #Shantyboat via Instagram
Full moon over the river in a sketchy night ride…
Got a mile down river with the #Shantyboat and Freddie…
Mike of Green Gables Marina puts the finishing touches on…
Somehow in this crazy mixed up world I interview people…
Though I’d heard of the ritual, my first time getting…
Steve Ebel, Mississippi River diver shows off his scull boat.…
Secret History interviewee Rhonda Anderson talks about keeping bees. #Shantyboat…
The deer are so tame here in Illinois they stick…
Off across the river in the Donboat to an interview…
Audio orgasm: listening to both a recording of our July…
A tour of the shantyboat and the Misssissippi's unique Driftless…
In preparation for our journey to the Mississippi River in…
So while the Kickstarter has been doing its thing and…
The shantyboat Dotty's maiden launch. Dropping a completely untested boat…
Jessica Bierbrauer, director of the Great River Road Visitor &…
John Sullivan, retired DNR officer in La Crosse WI, talks…
Kali Arlene, Latsch Island boathouse resident in Winona MN, talks…
A week on the Mississippi River in the dead of…
A Secret History exhibited at FIGMENT in Oakland, a one…
A relaxing evening at sunset from a recent trip on…
A very brief history on the evolution of river craft…
Two unusual portraits of the shanyboat from inside, one a…
For weeks and miles people have been asking us, "How…
With days left before our departure for the Secret History…
In July, we are bringing the shantyboat across country to…
You must hate me. Last I left you with “Walls…
When we disassembled the Hollister chicken coop, we got a…
If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s not being…
Sometimes little things can be a big headache. And sometimes…
Let’s put in a floor! This is the floor that…
With both decks on, I could be an obsessive woodworker…
I put the aft deck on. Thought you should know.…
Oh, the motor well. Seems simple enough. Build a box…
Water is the enemy of wood longevity. Protecting the wood…
First off, now that the boat is upright, I made…
If you’ve been following the blog, you know that one…
Here’s a big pile of questions that occur to me.…
For months I’ve been wanting to flip the boat hull…
There you go. 3D rendering doesn't make anything more real,…
Now that the boat is ready to be flipped, I’m…
Timeline: Less than a week before the boat flip! The…
Remember the trailer? This one, the one that almost killed us?…
For a while now, my cousin Brian has been wanting…
So the skegs are mounted, but the carriage bolt countersinks…
So the skegs have been cut, spliced, drilled, countersunk, stained,…
Here we drill all sorts of holes in our newly…
I had to turn 14 foot pieces of lumber into…
When we built punk rafts and floated several big rivers,…
Fiberglass over plywood is ridiculously tough. There are wood and…
After the fill coat, the texture of the fiberglass cloth…
At this point, we have the fiberglass bonded to the…
Okay, so let’s review. Fiberglass (of more accurately glass-fiber reinforced…
We fretted over fiberglassing the hull so much, we put…
Did I mention that epoxy is stressful? To recap: You…
Everyone’s got one. Every now and then I’ll ask a…
I like to joke that I bring Old World Craftsmanship…
Oh god, at the end of every work day when…
It looks easy, right? What could go wrong? Four rectangular…
When we went to put sheets of plywood on the…
Today, the chickens come home to roost. Remember that pesky…
This was an exciting day because for the first time,…
It most conventionally built wooden boats, the frames refer to…
You know the scene at the end of any action…
The whole process of building a boat involves cutting a…
Boats are made of lots and lots of funny precision…
After months of hemming and hawing over plans and possibilities…
So it looks like we’re building a boat. Not merely…
“Ha ha,” said Alex when we took off with the…
Anyone know anything about trailer tow hardware like sway bars…
Sometimes the treasure hunt of creating something from salvaged materials…
We were planning to use Bruce’s pontoon boat that he…
Who would have thought boatbuilding would involve so much math?…
So far, I’ve ignored the inside cabin layout, thinking that…
I’m trying to turn my shantyboat speculations into something that…
We were aware that this beast with its generously gabled…
Is it hot in here, or is it just me? …
You know how many marinas there are in the Sacramento…
I was worried that since we were planning to sheet…
Kai and I took a mad motorcycle trip up the…
Looking around, shanty boats have been around for a long…
It started with Camp Tipsy. Alex and I started talking…
As with all great projects, this one started with a…
We are currently preparing for a summer of fieldwork on the river and need all the help we can get. Please donate to the project.
We just completed a summer of fieldwork on the river. Please consider a donation to the project.
We are currently doing a summer of fieldwork on the river and need all the help we can get. Please donate to the project.
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while we journey to and explore the Ohio River!