Welds do flex. The difference is all the riveted boats are made from very thin aluminum that comes in rolls. Welded boats are thicker plate. It’s very difficult to weld thin aluminum sheet and what these guys don’t tell you is that rivets are more of a function of using thin sheet rather than “we use rivets because they are superior”. On the other hand starting with material that flexes less (I.e. thick aluminum plate) is much stronger. Welds do have plenty of flex for this application and these boats run for decades without cracking. What you find on riveted boats is that the rivets will leak and flat unriveted areas will crack much easier. They don’t crack on the riveted areas necessarily but on the flexing flat bottom portions that see abuse. There’s a reason you see riveted boats in deeper rivers and lakes - they can’t take the abuse of the shallows that a welded plate boat. To recap: Thin sheet applications like airplanes and thin sheet boats, rivets are the only option because the thinner material flexes so much and because of the difficulty of welding thin materials. Using thicker materials makes a boat flex less and less prone to damage. The welds if done in the right place and in the right way are stronger than the parent metal. For example much of the design is formed on a break (bended) then welded on the corners inside and out making them thicker than the parent metal.
Thank you for this really great explanation!! You guys do an excellent job with your videos and you always provide sooo much detailed information as well!! Merry Christmas!! :)
I have had both. My welded cracked everywhere it was welded. My 15X40 Alumacraft riveted boat has not leaked through the rivets since I bought 7 years ago. I us it commercially. However it has developed a few pin holes due to corrosion. JB Weld was a quick fix. I should have installed a zinc on the water line when I bought it. If a rivet does loosen I can easily fix. Conclusion.....buy a riveted boat
I don’t have a diploma but I do have welded stringers to the hull, and what you just stated about them one might wonder about hanging diplomas and their worth.
Should note there are different kinds of welded boats. Welding a sheet of .080/100 together like tracker/crestliner/smokerkraft vs plate .160/.125 or .250/.160 is very different. Welded hulls could not do the complex curves of rivets but that is changing. Coming from rivet to weld, it's a toss up. I like the light weight of a bare .80 thick hull sometimes, but if fishing rocky areas I like the plate welded hull. Neither leak with exception of water from fish I bring inside. Been told glass is the best, maybe will try that someday.
If you get away from the .80 and .100 thin aluminum and put some 1/4 inch , 3/16 bare minimum on your hulls they won't flex . Riveted boats I don't care what make and model when useing metal that flexes under wave impact and shore rubbing and the occasional ride over a stump will leak . And the same thickness of metal welded will flex and can and break welds . Do everyone a solid and build your boats useing solid material and if your not have a warranty that covers it and quit bullshit ing people who have those flex leaking issues and do it quickly and quit giving said people the bullshit 2 year run around back and forth dealer , manufacturer crap . Frigging stand behind what you build or get the hell out of business, build quality stuff and that's the bottom line , and when you do and stand behind it like you should alot more people will come your way .
Great video! I didn't know that about Rivets and welded hulls. Thank you. On a side note: I bought a new 14 foot Lund and a 12 foot Smokercraft back 2012. Great Boats, BUT I noticed some corrosion and pitting showing up in the above deck Stern area esp. near the splash well area and on the outer Transom, on BOTH boats, and after only 2 years of use, in Salt and Freshwater. Both Hulls handled great in the saltwater, better than freshwater, but clearly they didn't like the saltwater and always rinsed them THOROUGHLY with freshwater after EVERY use in saltwater. I wonder if there are different grades of aluminum out there used by different manufacturers because I've seen older boats that were used constantly in saltwater but had no corrosion whatsoever and those owners rarely rinsed them off after...
45 year of experience in Grumman canoes and boating in aluminum boats. I can tell you that if you want to stave off corrosion for longer, you need to wash that boat with SOAP, or a desalinisation solution available at boat shops. Same goes for rinsing out your motor. In the end, only keeping a wax finish on your boat will really work to isolate the material from the salt. The good news is: galvanic corrosion will likely not harm your boat to the extent that it leaks or becomes unsafe. If you live in a rainy part of the coutry, the best maintenance is to leave it uncovered so the rain water can keep it clean. I do, but I cover mine due to overhanging trees, which can leave their marks on aluminum.
If done right a welded boat is just as good and will last as long as a riveted boat. I can personal recommend Creastliner for welded and Lund for riveted as l have owned both and both to this day still do not have any hull leaks or defects. Both though have had to have new transom's installed. Both are over 25 years old.
Buy fiberglass and you will not have worries about weld fractures or leaking rivets! They are good till the wood used in floors and transoms rots ... as it also does in aluminum boats
I bought a riveted boat never again. Just a nightmare. New leaked 2 years warranty covered it but it’s a constant every 3 months deal. Now no more warranty and no more fishing
We had a riveted boat at our cottage that always leaked. My bother was driving to a lake at 60 M/h and it flew out of the back. It hit the road at 60 m/h and never leaks again.
Its been my experience that ALL Aluminum boats eventually crack the hulls for one reason, stress fractures...which come from the constant flexing of the hull...all aluminum does it whether on aircraft or on boats...you can weld it and it works, for a while, but will generally crack again...the only way to fix it permanently is with another piece of aluminum called a doubler...look at older aircraft and most of them have a repair that looks like a patch...this is a doubler....the more horsepower you have and the more you run in chop the more cracks you will have.....its the weak point of aluminum boats. No dealer or manufacturer will tell you this as if you knew you would not buy an aluminum boat..
But glass does the same thing? Glass does and will crack under pressure and especially if you fish a rocky bottom like hartwell like me i feel aluminum is the best way to go. Nothing against glass boats tho i do like the stability and ride and speed.
If welding is cheaper, someone needs to jack up Gregor and Klamath boats on the West Coast. They are welded aluminum and a 15' 20" transom open boat goes for a kool kat $5000/6000 grand. NO trailer NO motor
@@ddm62571 Because it literally doesn't matter how many holes you put in a Lund, it will float. See here for proof: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-a_KFaSQQNaw.html Also, airplanes, including amphibious planes, use riveted construction. Welding aluminum weakens the surrounding metal, rivets are superior than welds in this application.
@@NytronX You can't compare aircraft to boats. Completely different type of machinery. I've witness a older Lund boat were the rivets were starting to losing up at the transom. That's the problem right there. That's why most boat companies weld their boats. Superior seiling!
@@eugeneabreut5208 I'm a licensed aircraft mechanic and have driven thousands and thousands of rivets. I have also done a whole bunch of gas welding, and some TIG welding as well. My opinion on this topic, and I've owned several Lund and Alumacraft hulls (just bought a new 1775 Crossover), is that it takes more skill to weld if a human is doing it. Like Terry says though, if it's a machine welding the seams...there is far more labor in the riveting process. But if the welded hull is damaged, it's far harder to repair it--and in fact I think you'd have to settle for a riveted repair in many cases. Welding makes the metal very hot--so any heat-sensitive materials would need to be removed before welding, whereas with riveting you'd just fabricate the patch and have at it. So in terms of manual labor applications, I can see why a welded hull might be more expensive. Skilled welders are very expensive. I can teach a monkey to drive a rivet, or set the head. Once you've done 50-100 of them, you can almost do it in your sleep...and you can certainly do it with your eyes closed. Not so much with a welded seam that has to then be water-tight. I don't know how these welded hulls are built, but I presume there is at least some manual welding done, if nothing more than in the areas not easily accessible by a welding machine. But on long runs in well-exposed areas, the welding machine would be more economical I'd think. The other thing I'll say is that although I don't necessarily agree with Terry's statement about rivets "flexing," I think I see where we was going with it. But aircraft rivets usually "work-harden," so they are soft enough to drive/buck, but then get harder (tougher) once driven. So they are *very* hard once driven and then aged a bit. I've drilled out many many rivets from 50+ old aircraft components, and they are almost as tough as steel. So I seriously doubt that they'd "flex" per se, if Lund is using the same alloy like a 2017, 2117 (most common) or 2024 that's used for structural applications in aircraft. There are alloy 1100 rivets too, but these don't typically work harden nearly as much as the 2xxx-series rivets do. I don't know what allow Lund and Alumacraft are using though. Finally, I've been to Canadian fly-in resorts where they were using both Lund and Alumacraft hulls that were 20-30+ years old. These are 14' open-hulled boats (no flooring), with just a few seats going across. I saw VERY little water seepage, and those boats are beaten by the "guides" who took us fishing. They are not at all gentle on equipment. Of course I've also flown and worked on many aluminum aircraft that are 50+ years old. Unless they've been damaged or operated in a salt-air/water environment, there just isn't anything wrong with the metal. And many of these aircraft had no primer applied inside. They use Alclad aluminum of course (structural alloy with a very thin layer of sacrificial "pure" aluminum clad on either side), but otherwise Cessna didn't really do anything special to the inside of most of their fuselages made in the 1950-1960s. Piper did, but not Cessna. So I tend to be a fan of riveted hulls more so than welded hulls, just because of the beating they can take...and the ease of which repairs can be made. But in this day of Solidworks and CNC lasers/brakes designing, cutting and bending parts, I can see how it's significantly cheaper to make a riveted hull. I can assure you that "Rosie the Riveter" never went to aircraft mechanics school: She learned how to rivet on Monday, and became an expert by the end of the week. It's really not difficult at all.
@@bluehornet6752 Nice explanation. He didn't talk about the rivets flexing, but the aluminum around the welded seam. That it flexes under pressure and tends to show that over-time. And yes, lots of Guided Camps here with beat up old Lunds :)
amen I say this a lot to all my welded boat friends who talk trash about my 50 year old StarCraft. I've had to replace about 20 rivets in her, that's with me using it 100+ times a year running rivers and lakes you wont see a welded production boat last half that time LUND is the best hull out there for sure. i love the design
Lund pontoons are welded...... if any part of a boat resembles and airplane it’s the pontoons.........shouldn’t they be riveted by your argument?????? they are welded. Hmmmm.
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, to be honest... If you talk to aluminum boat builders like Boulton and Hewescraft who built hulls with thicker marine-grade alloys, they tend to weld the hulls. Those alloys (like 5052) lend themselves better to welding than something like a 2024 alloy, which is used in aircraft float fabrication. That said, and as Terry mentioned in the video, if the welding can be automated...then it's going to be cheaper to weld them than to rivet them. Riveting is time-consuming, and takes at least two people on something the size of a hull. Manual welding would be very skill-intensive, and the labor costs for one skilled welder would (arguably) cost as much as that to pay two people riveting. Riveting is very easy to learn, and one can achieve a significant level of expertise in a relatively short time--I taught my wife to drive and buck aircraft rivets in a weekend, easily. Welding...not so much. However if the welding is done by a machine, then I would think that would be a far less expensive way to build the things. Also, aircraft floats are subject to FAR more stress than pontoons on boats though. You typically get up to 60+ mph on take-off, and landing speeds can be higher than that. So the alloys of aluminum necessary to withstand such forces (like 2024-T3) are not at all good candidates for welding. Thus they tend to be riveted. Also, with aircraft floats there are a bunch of internal components like bulkheads, stiffeners and reinforcing plates that must be present to withstand the stresses projected to occur. Those things would *not* be easily welded in an aircraft float. So riveting makes much more sense, especially when it comes time to repair those components. But the stresses in a pontoon boat pontoon are going to be much less, so they aren't likely to need nearly the same number of internal components. So I can see why they are welded--although it's quite possible that there are still some internal parts that are riveted as sub-assemblies, and then welded in. I'm not sure about that however.
