For the annual Cambridge University Cardboard Boat Race we got together to build the biggest cardboard boat the river Cam had ever seen! Watch the video
- Nearly 5km of packaging tape were used
- The boat weighed over 250kg
- The total dispacement of the boat would give 9 tonnes of boyancy, that's 1 and a half African bush elephants
Creating this boat was a act of teamwork and generalised planning. We we're not able to know exactly which materials and how much of each we would have so we had to plan in a general sense of what we'd like to achieve and how best to go about it. The team settled on aiming to build the biggest boat we could.
Building a cardboard boat needs a lot of cardboard. Building on our experiences from the previous year we knew carpet tubes offered excellent strength but little volume. We also knew they were hard to transport and could only be stored for a couple of days before the build.
In the end we made this:
