The Great Concrete Canoe Race

Education Energy & Sustainability
The Great Concrete Canoe Race

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For me, Concrete Month has been about discovering all kinds of amazing uses for a material that, before, had seemed pretty mundane. But among engineers, that sentiment—that concrete can do so much more than we normally ask of it—is not new.  Case in point: the concrete canoe phenomenon.

The embedded video from the University of Illinois gives a great overview of concrete canoeing and its history, which began in 1971 with the first intercollegiate concrete canoe race between teams of civil engineers at UI and Purdue. It also touches on the two key engineering aspects of a successful concrete canoe team: the design of the concrete mix and the physical construction of the canoe itself. For specific details of the high-performance concretes developed for some of these events, check out Concrete Canoe Magazine, which has back issues chock full of technical articles available for free download once you fill out a short contact form. A number of concrete canoe casting time-lapse videos are posted on YouTube, and these give a good sense of how the boats themselves are put together. [Thanks, Jorge!]

Concrete Canoe | American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)

6 thoughts on “The Great Concrete Canoe Race

  1. Ben says:

    Cool! My dad built one in Russia in 1961. I have a home movie of his first test on the Ufimka river.

  2. GeekDadof4 says:

    I love the Concrete Canoe competition. MTU wins the design portion almost every year now (at least the Midwest Regionals), so if you can find out the details of their design, it would be a great reference model. One of the more amazing things I think those civil engineers can do.

  3. tactical bacon says:

    awsome

  4. tactical bacon says:

    Very 3d in thinking.

  5. rocketguy1701 says:

    Go Bears!

  6. Carreras de canoas de hormigón - Ikkaro says:

    […] y de aprender cosasa nuevas. La mayoría realmente curiosas, y es que paseando por Makezine he encontrado una noticia referente a carreras de canosas hechas de […]

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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