Build your own island

By John N. Hait
The CoolScientist

How would you like to have your very own island? It’s not difficult. Just build one that floats. Then if you don’t like where it is, you can move it. Try doing that with your homestead!

A floating island would be built different from a boat. A boat is essentially a container full of air, which pushes water out of the way. For every pound of water pushed away, it will support a pound. But if a boat gets damaged, the whole thing goes to the bottom. However, if one uses a large number of small containers to displace the water, then if some get damaged, the craft remains afloat so repairs can be made.

The handiest and cheapest floats are 2-liter soda bottles. If you look in the right places they are free. As in the illustration, they should be placed with the caps down. That way, you can pack more of them together, and if a cap leaks, the bottle won’t fill with water.

First, tie the necks tightly together with plastic rope that won’t deteriorate in water. Then put a concrete deck over the top of them all. However, the concrete must be poured in a special way.

Movement of the craft will cause concrete to crack. So it is poured as separate tiles that only cover several bottles per tile. Cut strips from plastic sacks to separate the tiles. And, leave the plastic in place as it will act as a bearing between them.

Plastic rope can be used to interconnect all of the tiles by burying the rope in the concrete, woven from tile to tile over the whole deck. Then when movement occurs, the tiles can shift individually rather than being destroyed by wave action.

Concrete works great in compression, but lousy in tension. In a building, one uses steel rebar to provide tensile strength. Here, natural materials that include strong fibers, like coconut fiber, should work well. Mix lots of fibrous material into a moist sand/cement mixture. This allows the tiles to be only 1 inch (2.5 cm) thick over the bottle ends. Unlike steel, natural fiber won’t rust. Thus it should last longer, save money and cement, while eliminating needless extra weight which would overloading the bottles.

Every 2-liter soda bottle full of air will displace 4.4 lbs of water. So, with about 9 bottles per sq. ft. you get 39.6 lbs of lift. The bottles of a single layer 4 ft. x 8 ft. section will support 1267.2 lbs, (less the weight of the cement.) In metric, 100 bottles per sq. meter will hold up 200 kg. More layers of bottles can be added underneath. (Naturally, without the concrete.) Simply tie the bottles together and to the deck layer above.

If pretty enough, your island may even pay for itself. South of Cancun Mexico, Richie Sowa’s “Spiral Island” uses 300,000 plastic bottles, plus bamboo, plywood, and fishing nets. Its 3,444 sq. ft. (320 sq. m.) comes complete with soil and sand for his garden and beach. It has a self-composting toilet, solar-powered oven, lights and CD. A plastic lining in the roof of his two-bedroom house collects rain water for his warm water shower and wave-powered washing machine.

It has become quite a tourist attraction, drawing 100 visitors per day, with most giving donations.

It makes one wonder if a theme park dedicated to explaining and demonstrating alternative energy, along with practical functioning examples for turning free energy into money, wouldn’t likewise become a unique tourist attraction.

Some enterprising person may even begin building them for sale. If covered with green plants, and beautiful flowers, I’d suspect that they would go for a pretty penny.

Saipanettes?

There are many interesting projects described on the CoolScience website, and in CoolScience publications. Subjects include Passive Annual Heat Storage; Improving the Design of Earth Shelters; Resonant Fields: The Fundamental Mechanism of Physics; Anticipating Terrorism; and How to Recycle Scrap Metal into Electricity. See www.coolscience.info. Click on Extraordinary E-books.

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