Houseboat Magazine

from an RV and he also added an apartment-sized refrigerator and a microwave. All new wiring, plumbing and water and fuel tanks went in and the interior seating was replaced. Using his weld- ing skills, he fabricated a stainless steel stove cover, aluminum hatches, a heavy-duty ladder and swim platform , a ladder to the top deck, another from the galley to the aft deck and all new railings. He installed the railings right by having them sit on oversize stainless steel pads and through-bolted them to aluminum backer plates. They were heavily caulked because But the fresh, attractive appeal of the boat didn’t happen without a lot of effort. Before the makeover, the boat had sat run-down and shabby on a trailer along a road in Portsmouth, Ohio for several years. Sitting on six flat tires, it attracted no attention from any prospective buyers. The upper cabin’s floor had a large hole in it, the lower area had no floor at all, and there was no engine or drive in the boat. But John Cook, of Ashland, Ky., who loves a bargain, figured he could fix it up. “I’m a project guy,” he says and is confident he can do about anything. The first thing he had to do after buy- ing her was to spend 45 minutes pump- ing the water out of it with a sump pump. What Is That? When he finally dragged it home, his wife’s reaction was, “That’s the boat?” He put it in a building he uses as part of his welding business and began stripping it down. Out came the floors, walls, ceilings, wiring, plumbing, water and fuel tanks and even the stringers in the hull. What he didn’t do, he says, was to take pictures as he worked. “A lot of people asked me later if I did, but I didn’t. I wish I had, but I didn’t think about it at the time.” As he started the re-building process, Cook says he was guided by one of his main principles. “I’m cheap,” he says proudly. “I don’t pay anything if I don’t have to.” So the galley cabinets, counter tops and the new paneling came from a building supply outlet and he salvaged the sink from somewhere else. The three-burner LP stove was a take-out he didn’t want any water seepage into the boat. That is also why he didn’t in- stall any deck fittings, but instead, put the water filler tube inside the cabin and the fuel filler line under a hatch on the aft deck. The boat got a fresh coat of paint, but the truck bedliner he used on the decks turned out to have poor UV pro- tection so it changed from its original blue to a greenish color as it sat in the sun. He changed brands, re-did it and finished the top deck off with new can- vas all the way around the railings. That was not cheap, he notes.Power Needs There were some bumps in the road to making the boat mechanically sound. He only needed one engine, but located a pair of used 318 cubic inch Chrysler Fury engines on eBay where the bidding had ended without a sale. He contacted the seller and negotiated a price before he and his son jumped into his truck and drove 10 hours to a marina on the Mississippi River to hear them run. Satisfied, he loaded them into his truck and drove all the way back home. “I didn’t want to pay for a motel room,” he explains. There were some additional problems with a bracket on the oil pan that mat- ed to the hydraulic clutch that had to be resolved and he eventually replaced a mechanical lever for the clutch with an electric solenoid. After the engine went in, he added rubber mufflers to give it a nice mellow tone. The biggest problem was the out- drive. After the boat was in the water, he found he had to keep tinkering with it and trying to adjust it. That required him to pull the boat from the water each time with the trailer. “The adjustments are tough if you don’t know what you are doing,” he 48 Houseboatmagazine.com 10 Houseboatmagazine.com

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