Re: Johnson 150GT on a 14ft Fiberglass boat...
What style is your hull? Is it a flat bottom, semi V, deep V, pad bottom? How wide is the hull from chine to chine? These are questions you should ask yourself. The boat can be built to handle the weight and power, but frankensteining in a bunch of metal and crap is not the answer.
You need to gut it to the shell, remove the floor stringers, transom, all of it. You need to build the transom in layers of marine ply and epoxy as thick as the splashwell will allow, You can go more thick, but two inches of transom is enough for a 150 horse motor. You will need to glass in new stringers. On a 14 foot boat, sometimes there are no stringers or there are only a few and they are marginal. This depends on hull type of course.
Glass in braces from the transom to the stringers. Two should be adequate. They are refered to as "knees", maybe someone can post a pic of them. Glass in a new floor, and foam under the entire floor, more for structure than anything else, because a 14 foot boat does not have the under floor volume to hold enough foam to keep the boat afloat with a 150 horse motor on it. You take on water, that boat WILL sink, period. The reason I say to rebuild all of it is because the floor, transom, stringers and hull act as a single structure. You can't just beef up one, you need to beef them all up to get the most strength.
Once the boat is complete, you will probably end up with an ill handling and dangerous boat, but there are lots of those on the water. They are called bass boats...
But do you guys have any SENSABLE ideas to re en force my transom and make my motor stay on?
