1969 Montomery Ward 14' Fishing Boat Restoration?

[koreywerk]

Helllo,

I inherited a 14' 1969-70 (there abouts) fishing boat. It is aluminum and is in pretty rough shape. I am not familiar with how well these were build and what must be done to resore the boat. I am really good at autobody and have completely restored a couple vehicles and am thinking of restoring the boat.

I would like to take the bench seats out and put a solid floor with a pedestal up front. THe boat doesn't seed really deep and wanted to know if anyone is familiar with the boat at all and if what I am thinking of doing is possible. I can envision it in my head.

I am not sure if by taking ou the benched that it will lose alot of strenght in the boat or not. It appears the benches are just resting in there by a couple screws and brackets and would be very easy to take out.

I am told the boat has a couple slight leaks as well where the rivets meet. I had thought about putting like a seam sealer in there but wasn't sure it that is the right way to go. Maybe if I am going this far having someone re-rivet or something. I am not sure. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank YOu,

Korey

 

[BF]

Re: 1969 Montomery Ward 14' Fishing Boat Restoration?

Hi Korey & welcome to Iboats.

I don't know your make/model of boat in particular, but I re-did an '86 16 open aluminum fishing boat myself this spring. I kept the bench seats, but did new tops out of plywood, coated with polyester resin, then primed and painted. I added storage in the front bench with a hinged lid (for the battery), and a larger storage compartment in the 2nd bench for general storage (also with a hinged lid). Mine has the split rear seat (actually has 2 corner seats if you know what I mean). In the port one, I made part of the lid hinged and lift up for a storage compartment, and also added an electrical bus and fuse panel inside. I mounted switches for the bilge, running lights and accessories (power outlet and fishfinder) in the port seat bulkhead (facing the driver). It's a tiller steer by the way. Also I painted the inside of the hull with your basic tremclad gray primer. Looks mucho better than before. Oh, and I sacrificed a set of auto booster cables to run from the battery back to the electrical connections in the rear hatch. I ran these cables inside a piece of 1 1/2" black PVC pipe that I pop riveted to the side supports. That keeps the cables from getting snagged by a stray hook or something. Home depot even had caps for the ends of the pipe so it looks finished.

If you can imagine what you want, I can see no reason why you couldn't build it. I took a front casting deck out of my other 16' utility boat because I didn't want it in there. It had been built on top of the front bench up into the Vee of the bow. They just used some 2x4's to build up the bow seat so the plywood deck would sit level with the bench seat. Then they had bolted one of those seat bases (looks like it's made from about an 18" piece of pipe) through the reinforced plywood. It had a hinge in the front so a good chunk of the floor lifted up and the space under there was used as storage. Looked like it would've worked, but it was a bit high for my tastes, and I since I'm hauling kids around all the time, I didn't want to have the floor raised up that high.

Yes I'd be concerned about making the hull more flimsy if you took out the bench seat. Why not leave it in (for structure) but build a wood floor in front of it (a bit lower). That way you could attach a flange onto the bulkhead of the bench seat that the floor would sit on.

Also, maybe you should float the boat before you get into it so you can see how bad it leaks. If you have a trailer, you can put water in the boat (by hose) and mark the rivets that leak from the outside with a marker. Then drain the water and you can "buck" those rivets to tighten them up.

I took one of my boats to a tig welder who put some patches on the outside over some stress cracks... years later, it's still good.

anyway there's a few ideas for ya... hope that helps.

Good luck.