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Wow guys! Thanks for all the great posts and the very nice pic's. I love the green '74 Vector, it has an old mustang vibe to it, very cool!

Sorry that we have been away so long, it has been a long old winter and we are getting anxious to get started with some more work on the re-build. Attached are some more pics from last year and we have a few questions for you if you don't mind.

This picture is of the fusebox that was located half way between the engine and the ignition/throttle control. When we opened it up it is pretty rough. There were wires that were not even capped off and the two relays are pretty rough looking. I'm surprised the boat even ran at all. Once we had some problems lowering the motor and I happened to hit this box with my hand and it started working again.
I'm not sure if we can rebuild it or if we should just see how much a new one would cost and buy the new trim relays as well.
What have the rest of you done?











The next couple of pictures are of the ignition/throttle control and you will notice a dial that is attached to a spring structure. When we turned this dial when we were operating the boat it did'nt seem to do anything, does anyone know what it is suppossed to do? The other thing is it appears that someone added a blue wire to fix a problem that they may have been having. You can see the wire in the next three pictures below from where it enters beside the dial and goes underneath the spring part along to a small cylinder shaped item. Anyone have any ideas why? or if it is ok to leave as is? Its just that if we have the control out of the boat if there is something we need to upgrade or replace, now would be the time to do it. We are very happy to receive your expertise and suggestions, keeping in mind my high school student budget.

So here are a few pic's just to bring you all up to speed where we were on the progress of the rebuild before we put a tarp for the winter. We will have a couple more posts before we start to work on it this year so stay tuned... We are suppossed to have a big storm starting tommorrow and we could get quite a bit of snow so it may be another couple of weeks.

This picture is using the grinder to cut enough of the fiberglass hull to get all of the remaining old transom out.



The next two pictures show where we were cleaning up some of the fibreglass and found the corner had a lot of autmotive body fill used to patch some damage.







We gave the boat a good bath to get rid of a lot of the dust and dirt that was left after sweeping up what we could.





The nice original red color!














Too bad it won't stay this shiny!







We moved the boat to it's winter location...





Opps!!! Dad looks pretty upset! Actually, he just posed for this picture...

Glad to hear your going to be back at it! We are going to be getting some snow late tonight and into tomorrow as well. I am about ready for this to be over with already. I have a boat I want to get done.

Windshield removed




Gauges and steering wheel removed.




Boat turned on it's side to begin work on the bottom. The duct tape is where we put glossy cardboard and duct tape over the holes where we happened to go through when we were removing the core. The patches were completed using fiberglass cloth and resin.




This section is very rough with what appears to be a covering of clear silicone.




The next several pictures are us removing what appears to be a thin layer of fibreglass cloth that must have been added some time over the history of the boat. It has been applied on both sides of the center of the boat. Some of it is too easy to remove and some is very difficult. The surface of the bottom where this layer was applied looked quite wavy which is why we decided to pick a way at it in the first place.



















This picture shows where the boat must have been damaged either by running into a rock or sliding up on a rough beach. The patch appears to be solid but if you think we should remove it and replace let us know.




Another shot of the original color of the boat.




We started sanding the bottom which is very tedious and time consuming!




After we sanded this part we wet it down with some water just for fun!

We started working on the trailer as the boat was finally off of it. We want to replace the old rims and tires with larger tires and mags that we happened to have in the basement which were off of a 260E Mercedes. The rollers are pretty old and deteriorated. We found that the rollers are quite costly and since our budget is so tight we decided to go with wood and will look at covering it with something like commercial carpet. What does everyone else use? We would appreciate your suggestions... ...We also replaced the wiring as the lights even though they were new last year were not working correctly. Now that they have been rewired they seem to be working the way the should!




Some modification of the wheel fenders is required for the new rims and tires to fit. We needed to get the fenders off but the bolts were seized so we carefully used a grinder to remove them.




Here is how the trailer looked with all of the old rollers. Nice but it seems that we can't just get them adjusted perfectly to get the boat to sit properly on the trailer. No matter how we tried it just seemed that the trailer is honestly too large for the boat and could not adjust correctly to prevent damage to the boat when launching or unlaunching the boat.
















Here is he motor all wrapped up in tarps sitting on our homemade motor stand after we removed the motor from the boat.




Here is the boat as we began turning it over to put it back on the trailer. There was only my Dad and I so as you can imagine it was really hard to do carefully. The experience was frustrating enough that I do not have any other pictures to show you.



Here is a sad picture of my boat and trailer with my lonely motor sitting there in January 2013.

So happy to see you got rid of the rollers on that trailer! They are so bad for our boats.

I would put another set of bunks on there personally so you have a total of four of them. Better support for the boat. and especially if you plan to recore it on the trailer.

bhbestcustoms wrote:Wow guys! Thanks for all the great posts and the very nice pic's. I love the green '74 Vector, it has an old mustang vibe to it, very cool!

Sorry that we have been away so long, it has been a long old winter and we are getting anxious to get started with some more work on the re-build. Attached are some more pics from last year and we have a few questions for you if you don't mind.

This picture is of the fusebox that was located half way between the engine and the ignition/throttle control. When we opened it up it is pretty rough. There were wires that were not even capped off and the two relays are pretty rough looking. I'm surprised the boat even ran at all. Once we had some problems lowering the motor and I happened to hit this box with my hand and it started working again.
I'm not sure if we can rebuild it or if we should just see how much a new one would cost and buy the new trim relays as well.
What have the rest of you done?



The next couple of pictures are of the ignition/throttle control and you will notice a dial that is attached to a spring structure. When we turned this dial when we were operating the boat it did'nt seem to do anything, does anyone know what it is suppossed to do? The other thing is it appears that someone added a blue wire to fix a problem that they may have been having. You can see the wire in the next three pictures below from where it enters beside the dial and goes underneath the spring part along to a small cylinder shaped item. Anyone have any ideas why? or if it is ok to leave as is? Its just that if we have the control out of the boat if there is something we need to upgrade or replace, now would be the time to do it. We are very happy to receive your expertise and suggestions, keeping in mind my high school student budget.

The little thumb screw with a spring is throttle friction , so you can let go of the throttle and not hvae it go back to idle ( OMC cruise control )

the black disk with wires attached is the alarm horn ( over heat )

the black box with the relays and misc wires is for trim & tilt , I have an 1982 in the garage with the same thing , I can get pics if needed.

other than that I like the original red much much better , looking good keep at it

Hippie459MN wrote:So happy to see you got rid of the rollers on that trailer! They are so bad for our boats.

I would put another set of bunks on there personally so you have a total of four of them. Better support for the boat. and especially if you plan to recore it on the trailer.

Thank-you for your advice! I will definately put another set of bunks of which I agree will make it much more stable for recoring it on the trailer, I was quite concerned about that. Thank-you!

Brad

frogII wrote:The little thumb screw with a spring is throttle friction , so you can let go of the throttle and not hvae it go back to idle ( OMC cruise control )

the black disk with wires attached is the alarm horn ( over heat )

the black box with the relays and misc wires is for trim & tilt , I have an 1982 in the garage with the same thing , I can get pics if needed.

other than that I like the original red much much better , looking good keep at it

So if the throttle spring is not set and we let go of the throttle it would just return to idle? If this is correct I guess we can presume that we have it set correctly, or is it supposed to return for safety reasons or just a preferece setting?

How do we know the over heat horn is working? One time when we were out the engine just died and I thought we were out of gas but discovered we were just getting low, like around a quarter of a tank. I pumped up the gas pressure pump and it restarted but it scared me that we might of been pushing the engine too hard as we were floared at the time. We seemed to be fine after that as we still went for another couple of hours and changed tanks without another issue.

If not too much trouble I would love to see some pictures of the black box you have, it will help us ensure we put ours back together the right way especially, as it has been a couple of months since we took it out of the boat.

We like the original red too but it depends how much repair is needed to restore it.

Lastly, Thank-you so much for your help. We really appreciate it!

Brad

Looking Good. Keep on posting. Bill