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Pontoon Powered By Electric Scooter
Last year FARM SHOW told you about Roy Phlipot’s one-of-a-kind paddle wheel pontoon boat powered by a zero-turn mower (Vol. 42, No. 2). There’s no outboard motor on back. Instead, propulsion is provided by a pair of 4-ft. dia. paddle wheels about halfway back on the boat. The boat’s paddle wheels are powered by the mower, which is bolted to the deck.
    Phlipot recently sent photos of a new pontoon he built that’s electric-powered by a mobility scooter, also bolted to the deck.
    “It looks pretty and runs very quiet with no fumes,” says Phlipot. “The first boat was an experimental model, and my wife and I wanted something that looked nicer and would accommodate her environmental allergies.”
He used 3/4-in. cold rolled steel to extend the axle out to both sides of the deck and installed a sprocket with keyway on the outside ends in order to drive the paddle wheels. He also made bearing brackets to support the outer end of the axle.
    He installed another sprocket with keyway on the inside ends of the axle, welding the sprocket to a metal plate that matches the bolt pattern on the drive wheel flanges of the scooter.
      “It doesn’t have the speed or power of my gas-powered boat but it works fine on our small lake. Like the gas-powered boat, it has no problem going through weeds and lilly pads,” says Phlipot.
“The only sound you hear is the paddles entering the water,” says Phlipot, who notes that his wife Mary Jo did all the decorating on the boat.
    Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Roy Phlipot, 8624 Rd. 24, Scott, Ohio 45886 (ph 419 622-4601; flipo@frontier.com).



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2019 - Volume #43, Issue #2