So I figured I'd post a sort of "log" of me and my dad's little project. So our boat is a 1974 Correct Craft Martinique inboard ski boat. It has a Ford PCM 351W engine with 240 horsepower. We recently had the transmission rebuilt a year or 2 ago because it is the original transmission with over 1500 hours on it (you measure boats by hours instead of miles). Here is a picture of what the boat looked like when we bought it 4 or 5 years back. As you can see it is quite an ugly color and far from the original paint job. Here is a pic of a stock paint job for a '74 Martinique for reference. So to begin this project we needed to remove everything attached to the boat as well as remove all stickers and decals. Removing the decals from both sides of the boat took forever. They were applied with industrial strength gorilla glue or something. (The fact that they were 20 year old decals didn't help either) Then it was time to start grinding. (My dad did all the grinding and epoxy work because he is a perfectionist and it is his boat) There was a metric butt ton of cracks that needed to be ground out and filled. (We didn't even touch the bottom of this boat during the project due to restrictions and limited equipment) After grinding everything out we epoxied the areas with this special epoxy that becomes 3 times stronger than steel when dry. We used the epoxy in the large areas that had been ground out, then used a putty to fill in the tinier cracks. Then we used some spray paint to prime the areas and fill in the miniscule cracks and wet sanded the boat with really fine sandpaper once everything dried. Now comes the real paint. We decided on an orange and black color scheme. The orange is an Alice Chalmer tractor orange. (The pictures don't show the actual color quite right so once we can get it in the sunlight I'll take a pic to give you a better idea of the actual color). We also have a family friend that does decals and he managed to find the exact same font for the lettering on the side of the boat. We also added a racing stripe on the driver side. As you can see it also has dual straight pipe exhaust. Those two copper pipes are the exhaust pipes. It's a 3" diameter straight pipe (about 5 feet long) from the engine to the rear, giving this era of Correct Crafts a beautiful exhaust note. Here is a video of a 67 Mustang for reference exhaust sound. And another good reference video. (This is almost the exact same boat as mine) This is all we have done so far. We still need to put the teak swim platform back on as well as the outer handrails and seats. We are also at some point going to get the interior re-upholstered to match the new color scheme. We are trying to finish this up in a month so we can take it to our lake for a week. As we get more done, I'll be posting more pics and hopefully a video or two. I also found a video I took a little while back of it on startup.
The Ski nautique and Martinique are both 18ft boats with 351's. If you bump up to a barefoot nautique, it is one foot longer with a 300hp 454 in it.
So I've got a few updates. We have gotten quite a bit more of the boat put back together. There is only a few more things to put on before it is all done. We have finished re-attaching the decals, windshield, and rub rail. The rub rail still needs to have a rope put in the middle (which my dad is in the progress of doing right now). We also have the rear handrail attached in the back. We are also reinforcing the swim platform because it was a little bit wobbly previously. We used 2 inch thick blocks of wood which we coated in fiberglass mat to prevent rotting. We are also using steel plates for added reinforcement. My dad then drilled the main holes for the mounting brackets on the swim platform and we did a dry fit of the teak platform. ____________________________________________________________________________ These pictures are from today. We have it almost completed and the swim platform is now on. We used caulk to seal all the holes that the bolts mount the swim platform through. All that is left to do is to put the rope in the rub rail, finish mounting the handrail, and eventually the upholstery. The upholstery will have to wait to after we spend a week at our lake for the first time this Friday.
