why do wooden boats sink?

Question

why do wooden boats sink?

Answer 1

Wood doesnt sink. When it is formed into a vessel capable of holding water it is no longer just wood and needs to be water tight.



However, when the boat takes on water, if the combined weight of water and any engines etc exceeds the degree of buoyancy of an unswamped vessel it will sink.



If in the process of sinking the boat breaks up into separate planks of wood then the individual planks may float.



All wood will eventually sink if it is soaked with sufficient water for exactly the same reasons.

Answer 2

The wooden parts only form a skin and perhaps the framing to hold it. While wood floats it doesn't have a lot more floatation available than for its own weight. And some timber is denser than water so won't float anyway(unlikely to use such timbers for boat-building!). The hull will still be holding a lot of mass such as ballast, fastenings, cargo, machinery etc. that will easily weigh more than the simple displacement of the raw timber should the hull become flooded. Without ballast any displacement hull is going to float too high and want to roll over - ballast causes the hull to ride upright and to respond much less to wave action. Unless the hull is fitted with sealed compartments for additional floatation it will not support complete flooding - even a simple tinny with an outboard on is near enough neutral when flooded, often not even that. There are requirements for small boats to be built now with sufficient floatation that if flooded they will still support the occupants and all fitted load - larger vessels have other constraints that makes this difficult to achieve, but much more onerous requirements are in place if the vessel is to be approved for use in it's designed capacity - such as deep sea fishing or transport of people or other cargo.

Answer 3

Few, if any, boats are made of only wood. The hull may be wood, but the hardware, motor, keel, fasteners and coatings are made from materials that are heavier than water. It is the weight of all the non wooden materials in the boat that ususally cause a 'wooden' boat to sink if it's flooded with water.

Answer 4

The wood that boats are built out of are more dense than say pine or fir. Thus the wood it self will barely float at the surface. Install engines, and gear and you tip the balance.....the boat will sink....even if slowly. Add a more buoyant foam or flotation pockets, and your back to a neutral buoyancy.

Answer 5

its not the wood that makes it sink, its the fact that if to much water gets taken into the boat it is more weight then the wood can hold up and it'll sink, usually because theres much heavier thing on the boat like cannons and stuff in the old days

Answer 6

Extra weight the wood gets saturated with water. Down it will go.

Answer 7

as a wooden boat builder and owner let me give this a shot......



first, there are few species of wood that I know of that will become waterlogged to the point they will sink. One or two ( greenheart down here in the West Indies) are so dense they sink,but that's another story.



What sinks a wooden boats is that it has stuff other than wood in it...usually fuel and water tanks but mostly engines in power boats and ballast keels ( to keep it upright) in sailboats. My boat ( see avatar pic) weighs 11 tons, and 2 1/2 tons of that is a big ol' chunk of lead on the bottom. If not for that lead, she would never sink......of course without that lead,she'd float on her side!