Instructions for Making a Pop Bottle Raft

If you’re considering entering a rafting contest, or you just want to go speeding down your own local river, you can easily make a soda bottle raft that will get you where you’re going – in a hurry! Okay, a soda bottle raft is a little silly-looking and won’t win any beauty prizes, but empty pop bottles are nothing but air so they weigh little and fly down river with not much effort. Don’t take your pop bottle raft through any rapids, but for around town, it’s perfect.

Granted, it’ll take some time to gather the two or three liter bottles for the raft. But, if you’re having a huge family reunion, or your family just drinks a lot of pop, you’ll have the bottles together in no time. Choose either the two liter or three liter, but not both, to make your raft.

To start the process of making the raft align the bottles on the grass or the driveway. It’s okay to assemble the raft indoors, but consider the size of it and whether or not you can get it out of the doorway when completed.

You can use Liquid Nail or contact cement to hold the bottles together for the moment. Arrange them to where the lids are glued together. So, align two bottles where the lids are touching and glue them together. Make another set, another set, and another set, until you have the length you wish the raft to be. Each time you make a new set of two, with lids glued together, glue those two, side-by-side, with the previous two.

To make the width of the raft, you’ll begin gluing the bottoms of the bottles together. To be clearer, you now have a long row of bottles with their lids and sides glued together, so go beside those and start gluing the bottom of a new bottle to the bottom of one of the previously-glued bottles. Glue the bottle bottoms all the way down the row, then start another row where you’ll glue the tops to the previously-glued bottles’ tops.

When the raft is completed it should look like this: a row, from top to bottom, of bottles with the lids pointing to the right. Then, a row of bottles with lids pointing to the left. The next row has the lids pointing to the right, and the following row has the lids pointing to the left. When all bottles are glued together, in the size you wish, your raft is almost complete. You can use any size pop bottles for the raft project but they all need to be the same size.

To make sure that the bottles stay together, wrap them from one end to the other, with duct tape. Duct take works really well on plastic and will just give the bottles a little extra support. Since pop bottles won’t be the most comfortable seating you’ll find on a raft, consider getting a piece of two-inch-thick styrofoam slab to throw on top of the pop bottles. After that it’s happy sailing.