The $200 boat

One of the great pleasures of living in Maine is the dickering lifestyle. Dickering is the business of buying and selling secondhand stuff. They even made a TV show about it, Downeast Dickering. This show came out just at the moment when we harried first-time parents were just learning to get a kid to sleep and it was a great thing to finally get her down and then relax with a show that showed a lot of familiar scenery and even some familiar characters. North Woods Law was a better Maine-based show, featuring several of my former students, and I even made a cameo once giving a pre-search brief to the Unity College SAR team before a line search. But Dickering was close to home, culturally speaking.

Aimee and I furnished and outfitted three homes and a small farm mostly by dickering. One of those homes, our AirBnB, is fully-furnished with dickered-for treasures, and seems quite successful despite this.

Anyway. I digress. Again. As always. 

Long story short, last year, in search of a compelling summer project that might be good family fun, I went and dickered for a secondhand motorboat and trailer, all of which I won for $200. This is a 1979 Galaxy 17-footer "bowrider" made of sprayed, chopped fiberglass. 

This was a cheap way of making a boat in the seventies and eighties, much maligned by "Wooden Boat" magazine types and other purists. But the thing about a heavy chopped glass boat is that it's hard to sink and even harder to destroy. So much so that boats like this are ten-a-penny on the sides of the road in Maine, although they are seldom if ever running and floating. You could buy one rather like it today on FacePlant for $500. There are at least three for sale locally. All would need at least as much work too, and probably not be worth a whole lot more at the end of the process. You don't get rich dickering. But you can improve your lifestyle significantly.

It took three trips to get boat and trailer home, one to buy it and scope out a plan for moving it, and two to execute the plan. The trailer was in such bad shape that it needed to be dismantled on site at the house where I bought it. The boat was intact, but had to be transferred from the dilapidated trailer to my flatbed. I used the flatbed winch and PVC pipe rollers for this. Then there was a complete engine in boxes, which went into the truck bed and cab on the second lift.

Here's the boat on the flatbed.

Here's the trailer on the flatbed, in pieces. This was dismantled and rebuilt with new fasteners and bearings and then sprayed with urea formaldehyde paint. Should last as long as I do.

And here's the engine in the process of being rebuilt. This is a Mercruiser 120, a popular sterndrive model from the glass pack boat era, built on a versatile GM base that also went into mail trucks and forklift trucks. It's a cast iron block, so eminently repairable by the backyard mechanic in a way that modern aluminum blocks are generally not. 

You can see the cracked crankcase leaking water. This is hosepipe pressure at 40-60 PSI, much greater than working pressure with the engine running. Rather than spend $500 or more for a rebuilt case, I welded it over and again until almost of this spray stopped and then put JB weld on a couple of tiny remaining pinholes, a time-honored shade-tree technique. I don't have great faith in this lasting forever, but I expect if it starts to leak again it won't be catastrophic. I'll have time to make it back to the dock.

New pistons, rings, bearings and seals cost around $400. Add another $300 or so total for a new marine alternator, a starter, a starter solenoid, and a little less for a tilt motor (the hydraulic pump that lifts the sterndrive out of the water for trailering). This particular tilt motor was rare as the proverbial rocking horse shit but eventually I sourced a supplier of modern replacements.

It was surprisingly easier to rebuild an engine in boxes than it would have been to strip one down and rebuild it. Everything was there, although the purpose and placement of some items was a little mystifying at times. 

Just a big 'ole jigsaw puzzle for a sumpy.

Here's a video of the engine in the final stages of rebuilding and testing.

And here's the final boat today after this year's job, which was to service the sterndrive to deal with an overheating problem that materialized on the final outing last year. I replaced the outdrive water pump and cleared a blockage in the exhaust, which in these boats also exits the cooling water from the engine. I also fitted a new Bimini cover that I got new-but-soiled merchandise from eBay. Nothing was wrong with it. Someone had ordered and returned it. 

Older carburetor-equipped motors start hard like this if you don't keep the carb charged with gas. You do this by starting it daily. That's annoying, but better than charging batteries. 

So, for an outlay of maybe $1,500, we have a nice boat here. All dickered-for, paid for, and fitted out.

I'd like to find a small outboard to use as a "kicker.'" This is a smaller motor used to save gas and noise while trolling for fish or maneuvering in tight spaces. There's already a mount for one on the back of the boat. It would also serve as an emergency motor, which would make it safer to use this boat while camping on big lakes or Maine sea islands. 

That might be a project for another year. For this year we'll just go cruise around a couple of local lakes.

One reason I wanted a motorboat was because our kid was so frightened of the canoe. Here she is the first time we took her for a canoe ride. What a face!

And here she is in the "engine boat." What an improvement!

It was worth all the effort just for that moment.