Since my inflatable seat was developing leak after leak I glued one together using vinyl cement and some cheap (20 Eurones) white 500g/sqm vinyl (PVC tarpaulin) from ebay. Works like a charm, no leaks, I did not even bother to add seam strips.
Since the seat worked so well I decided to build a packraft prototype from the rest of the vinyl. The build process was a bit less orderly than what you see in Matt’s videos and completely different since everything was glued, not heat sealed – today I took the raft out for a succesfull bikerafting test.
It weighs exactly 3 kgs before adding attachment points, the seat weighs 600 g. I used bottle cap valves for both the seat and the raft. I like them better than the boston valves since it is easy to make adaptors like one for the inflation bag, another one for an inflation tube etc. There are two “valves” on the raft: one for inflating and one for deflating.
I also added a DIY Packaft logo using the good old “rubbing accetone on a laser print” technique, but unfortunately it was on a position that was later needed for an attachment point 🙁
Here are some photos of the loaded raft:
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