Re: Boat Purchase Decision Help - 1993 Glastron 17.5' Merc. 3.0l - 4 cylinder I/O
I'll get you guys some pictures with better perspective on where that seam is. Looking at it I see that it seems to be a sandwich of one layer glass, one wood, two glass, one wood, one glass....leading me to believe it is a seam of two complete walls of the hull. On the outside it's just the stepped wood-look shape. It almost seems like there is a full fiberglass outer hull, with another entire composite hull within it.
Here's a crazy story: Finally put her in the water, come back the next day and there's almost a foot of water in the back half of the boat. Jumped in to get the bilge pump going and that put the boat so low that water started coming into the splash-well drain holes. Needless to say I got out asap and let the bilge do it's work. I was really bummed, thinking that my new Krusty had some serious hull leakage. I stopped by wally-world to get some boat bits and pieces and while I was there I picked up a new drain-plug. The boat previously had the lever type plug and I picked up the one you turn in to expand it (seemed to give it more expansion). Put that in and came back the next day to a boat with no water in it!! The old Krusty plug wasn't doing its job anymore. That was such a huge relief.
Among the things that I picked up was a float switch for the bilge - right now the previous owner had it on a toggle switch (it's an automatic pump that shuts off when the water is down but it does a test pump every 15-30 seconds to see if there's new water to be pumped (so it needs a switch). I'm going to wire up the float switch in parallel to the toggle, so that it will override the "off" toggle in the situation where the boat starts to take on water while docked.
Annnnd - the really good news is that I took her out for the first official ride today. Went through about 5 gallons of gas with my little motor (was out for like 4.5 hours) exploring the entire lake and all its little coves, etc. Boat putts along fine at 5mph while checking out the sites. Spend some time making sure she was solid and then opened it up - gets on a plane pretty quickly and tops out at 26mph (says my car GPS that I brought with me). Water was really choppy today so it was a little rough going but was a great time!
Sorry no pics today - was out solo. Will have picture updates of that seam as well as other things on the boat and any work that I start doing on it.
