Building the Boat With Marv

burrodebo · 07-02-2009, 08:32 AM

Four or five years ago I was at my wife’s grandparent’s house and saw an Alumacraft sitting in an open horse stall type enclosure gathering dirt and mostly being used to store Christmas ornaments and knick knacks in the off season. I gave it a once over noticing the 25 HP Johnson tiller motor mostly, and the fact that the hull looked decent. But it was covered in years of dirt and grime and who knew if that Johnson would even run.

Well, that boat ended up being mine, and six months ago I started restoring it. The boat is mine thanks to the generosity of my wife’s uncle – the man who had inherited the boat after the original owner, his brother, died of cancer. Many of you may know the original owner – Bruce Batterman, the consummate outdoorsman and the owner of Lincoln Archery back in the day. Without these two guys – Bruce and his brother – I would not have this boat. Both are good guys, and I know both wanted to see the boat brought back to life, back on the water, and used again.

That’s exactly what I set out to do late last fall, but I had no idea what this project would turn in to. My dad, another guy who, without his help, this boat would not exist, always told Chad and I, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” Well, I’m not sure everything is exactly right in this boat, but I know it’s darn close. And I know we did our absolute best to build it and that’s good enough for me. Thanks, Bruce, thanks Boyd, and Thanks dad.

I didn’t get as many photos of the project as I should have along the way so there may be a gap here and there. Overall though, I think this should be a nice little blog of the project and might help some guys as they seek to rebuild a boat of their own. Now, onto the project.

This is the first picture I took of the project. You can see that the boat is a 16 foot Alumacraft. Model T16 XL. I believe it is a 1984.

The original turf in the boat as blue and you can see that there was flooring built into it, though it was rotting out and wasn’t exactly what I wanted. In this picture you can see that the carpet has been torn off the front casting deck and that the main floor has been torn out of the boat altogether.

You can also see that a new nosecone has been fabricated as the old one was very soft and would not hold the new trolling motor I had on order.

Finally you can see that a piece has been fabricated to fit directly behind the front casting deck as you move toward the back of the boat. See it there, basically in the middle of the boat? It has the rounded sides. That’s where I will eventually put my batteries and onboard charger, plus, it will extend my casting deck another foot or so.

The boat is filthy and the wiring is old and unreliable. It’s becoming clear to me that even though the build is already underway, this thing needs a complete rebuild. It needs cleaned, painted, re-thought, rewired – it needs completely redone, Abresch style.

So, out everything came. This gave me not only a chance to clean out the bottom of the boat (you would not believe how many jig heads and split shot I found) but it also gave me a chance to give the hull a thorough visual inspection as well as clear out all the drainage routes. The hull looks solid, nothing to worry about, but now that it’s clean I decide that the faded out old grey/blue paint on the inside just won’t do.

So I looked online and found some really nice paint from Blue Water Marine and gave the interior a good once over. This paint is awesome -- like wrapping your boat in glass. And I thought the ultra gloss black would add a nice touch to the interior that I had planned.

Now we move into what I will remember as the two main phases of the project. Fabrication and wiring. This is the fabrication phase, obviously. Measure, measure again, cut, fit, drill. Measure, measure again, cut, fit, drill. Measure, measure again, cut, fit, drill. J

The entire vision of this boat from the very beginning was SPACE. You know those boats that you just can’t move in? There’s nowhere to step or walk when there’s two guys in the boat let alone three. I did not want one of those boats, so I based many of my decisions on the fact that I wanted as SPACE as I could possible have in a 16 foot boat with a 65 inch beam. That’s why you will not find a livewell on this craft (I rarely keep fish anyway, and when I do, I can utilize a stringer or fish basket.) You will not find rod lockers, you will not find a true “console.” All of these things would interfere with my SPACE, and I just can’t have that.

I also wanted FUNCTIONALITY. You have been on hose boats where everything is a pain, right? Trolling motor is underpowered. You have to wiggle the transom light just right to get it to come on. There are no rod holders, or the rod holders present are impossible to get a rod out of when a fish hits. You get the picture. So FUNCTIONALITY was the second factor driving the vision of the boat. I wanted to eliminate as many annoyances as I could before they occurred by thinking things through and building it right.

That’s a lot of set up to explain a simple wooden box. J Since I didn’t want to take up all kinds of room with a true console, I thought I’d just build a simple “control box” that would house my toggle switch panel and anything else I wanted to mount.. What you see here is that box. It would be attached to the starboard side of my boat, and at this point, I’m getting an idea about how I will rig my sonar.

The front casting deck is the only piece of wood that was not replaced as it was still plenty good. Everything else is new plywood.

This is what I refer to as the Winter of my Discontent. That’s my front casting deck on sawhorses in my garage after paint. I wanted everything to be protected from moisture as best I could but I didn’t want to use treated plywood because the stuff eats screws and bolts. Let me repeat, if you are using treated plywood to build a boat, you must use treated screws and galvanized hardware as it will corrode and eat through regular stuff. You may already know that, but I did not. You also may want to take a hard look at where that treated plywood touches aluminum and mitigate that issue.

Anyway, every piece of wood in the boat got two coats of Rust-Oleum, machine grey polyurethane enamel. I painted, and then I painted some more. Then I would go out the next night and do some painting. Then the next night it was, “Honey, I’m going to go do some painting.” I’m not sure how those hours in the garage breathing fumes and listening to classic rock at 35 degrees will ultimately impact my personality, but I did get a lot of wood painted – 24 individual pieces I believe.

More wood with paint on it. Does it look cold? It was. And boring too.

Again with the wood. This is most of it, all together, drying. By now, with the oil paint fumes and all the saw dust from the fabrication, my garage is starting to smell like a real shop. By dang if we don’t have a real project going on here …

I decided the blue carpet wasn’t really to my liking and set out to learn about boat carpet and choose a color scheme. I settled on black and tan, as you will see a little later. I ended up buying 25 feet of 16 oz. marine grade carpet in Sahara Tan (ordered online). If you guys are planning on carpeting a 16 foot boat, make sure to get the 25 foot roll of carpet. You will need all of it if you plan to wrap the edges.

Oh look, spring has arrived! My Winter of Discontent is over! And it’s time to get some carpet on these newly fabricated, newly painted boards. Here’s my old man (yes the same guy that is building bamboo flyrods with my brother (and yes, he is busy)) applying some two-faced tape to the rear deck before we put on the carpet. The carpet is held to the decking with staples and carpet tacks, the tape is simply to help keep the carpet from “bubbling.” You can see where we’ve cut a hatch so I can get to my fuel tank and there is the hole where I will mount my seat base.

Hey, this is starting to come along. This is looking toward the back of the boat from the port side. The new wood, covered in new paint, covered in new carpet, is going into the boat.

Looking toward the front of the boat. Remember that extension of the casting deck that I will store my batteries in? You can see it fabricated in this picture. The lid that will be hinged is covered with carpet. There’s two little pieces on the side that are not yet carpeted.

You can also see in this picture that we have cut two holes in the front casting deck to create storage compartments. This took a lot of thinking and measuring. Think about it. A boat comes to a point in three dimensions at the front. From bottom to top as the semi V progresses up, horizontally from wide to narrow on the gunwales (beam) and vertically wide to narrow again (from the top of the gunwale to the bottom of the V). Now, my dad and I may not be the smartest guys in the world, but figuring out the maximum size the storage compartments could be took a lot of head scratching and chin rubbing. But I think we got it. The storage compartment doors, the battery box door, and the fuel door will all be hinged with piano hinge that virtually disappears between two pieces of decking.

More to come!

**Slimdog** · 07-02-2009, 09:11 AM

Excellent, Bo! Ready for more!!!

Slim

Chad · 07-02-2009, 09:41 AM

Having fished out of the finished product, I can tell you, it's ALL casting deck. And that's ALL good.

Supposedly there was wiring and batteries and gas tanks and other essentials somewhere, but all I saw was an empty space to fish!

jimbosan · 07-04-2009, 12:32 PM

Very nice, I wish I had the patience to do stuff like that and the skill would be nice as well.

**JKL** · 07-07-2009, 08:40 PM

Very nice bo...I think I might have to do a winter project with mine

cougarw · 07-12-2009, 12:09 PM

Very nice. I redid one of my boats one time, so I know how much work and time you spent on it. It's all worth it when it done.

jarredbehrendt · 07-13-2009, 09:05 PM

Looks pretty sweet Bo!

07-02-2009, 08:32 AM	#1 (permalink)
burrodebo burrodebo is picking ice out of the guides Emeritus Directors Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: On the Water Posts: 3,251 Thanks: 26 Thanked 95 Times in 36 Posts	Building the Boat With Marv Four or five years ago I was at my wife’s grandparent’s house and saw an Alumacraft sitting in an open horse stall type enclosure gathering dirt and mostly being used to store Christmas ornaments and knick knacks in the off season. I gave it a once over noticing the 25 HP Johnson tiller motor mostly, and the fact that the hull looked decent. But it was covered in years of dirt and grime and who knew if that Johnson would even run. Well, that boat ended up being mine, and six months ago I started restoring it. The boat is mine thanks to the generosity of my wife’s uncle – the man who had inherited the boat after the original owner, his brother, died of cancer. Many of you may know the original owner – Bruce Batterman, the consummate outdoorsman and the owner of Lincoln Archery back in the day. Without these two guys – Bruce and his brother – I would not have this boat. Both are good guys, and I know both wanted to see the boat brought back to life, back on the water, and used again. That’s exactly what I set out to do late last fall, but I had no idea what this project would turn in to. My dad, another guy who, without his help, this boat would not exist, always told Chad and I, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” Well, I’m not sure everything is exactly right in this boat, but I know it’s darn close. And I know we did our absolute best to build it and that’s good enough for me. Thanks, Bruce, thanks Boyd, and Thanks dad. I didn’t get as many photos of the project as I should have along the way so there may be a gap here and there. Overall though, I think this should be a nice little blog of the project and might help some guys as they seek to rebuild a boat of their own. Now, onto the project. This is the first picture I took of the project. You can see that the boat is a 16 foot Alumacraft. Model T16 XL. I believe it is a 1984. The original turf in the boat as blue and you can see that there was flooring built into it, though it was rotting out and wasn’t exactly what I wanted. In this picture you can see that the carpet has been torn off the front casting deck and that the main floor has been torn out of the boat altogether. You can also see that a new nosecone has been fabricated as the old one was very soft and would not hold the new trolling motor I had on order. Finally you can see that a piece has been fabricated to fit directly behind the front casting deck as you move toward the back of the boat. See it there, basically in the middle of the boat? It has the rounded sides. That’s where I will eventually put my batteries and onboard charger, plus, it will extend my casting deck another foot or so. The boat is filthy and the wiring is old and unreliable. It’s becoming clear to me that even though the build is already underway, this thing needs a complete rebuild. It needs cleaned, painted, re-thought, rewired – it needs completely redone, Abresch style. So, out everything came. This gave me not only a chance to clean out the bottom of the boat (you would not believe how many jig heads and split shot I found) but it also gave me a chance to give the hull a thorough visual inspection as well as clear out all the drainage routes. The hull looks solid, nothing to worry about, but now that it’s clean I decide that the faded out old grey/blue paint on the inside just won’t do. So I looked online and found some really nice paint from Blue Water Marine and gave the interior a good once over. This paint is awesome -- like wrapping your boat in glass. And I thought the ultra gloss black would add a nice touch to the interior that I had planned. Now we move into what I will remember as the two main phases of the project. Fabrication and wiring. This is the fabrication phase, obviously. Measure, measure again, cut, fit, drill. Measure, measure again, cut, fit, drill. Measure, measure again, cut, fit, drill. J The entire vision of this boat from the very beginning was SPACE. You know those boats that you just can’t move in? There’s nowhere to step or walk when there’s two guys in the boat let alone three. I did not want one of those boats, so I based many of my decisions on the fact that I wanted as SPACE as I could possible have in a 16 foot boat with a 65 inch beam. That’s why you will not find a livewell on this craft (I rarely keep fish anyway, and when I do, I can utilize a stringer or fish basket.) You will not find rod lockers, you will not find a true “console.” All of these things would interfere with my SPACE, and I just can’t have that. I also wanted FUNCTIONALITY. You have been on hose boats where everything is a pain, right? Trolling motor is underpowered. You have to wiggle the transom light just right to get it to come on. There are no rod holders, or the rod holders present are impossible to get a rod out of when a fish hits. You get the picture. So FUNCTIONALITY was the second factor driving the vision of the boat. I wanted to eliminate as many annoyances as I could before they occurred by thinking things through and building it right. That’s a lot of set up to explain a simple wooden box. J Since I didn’t want to take up all kinds of room with a true console, I thought I’d just build a simple “control box” that would house my toggle switch panel and anything else I wanted to mount.. What you see here is that box. It would be attached to the starboard side of my boat, and at this point, I’m getting an idea about how I will rig my sonar. The front casting deck is the only piece of wood that was not replaced as it was still plenty good. Everything else is new plywood. This is what I refer to as the Winter of my Discontent. That’s my front casting deck on sawhorses in my garage after paint. I wanted everything to be protected from moisture as best I could but I didn’t want to use treated plywood because the stuff eats screws and bolts. Let me repeat, if you are using treated plywood to build a boat, you must use treated screws and galvanized hardware as it will corrode and eat through regular stuff. You may already know that, but I did not. You also may want to take a hard look at where that treated plywood touches aluminum and mitigate that issue. Anyway, every piece of wood in the boat got two coats of Rust-Oleum, machine grey polyurethane enamel. I painted, and then I painted some more. Then I would go out the next night and do some painting. Then the next night it was, “Honey, I’m going to go do some painting.” I’m not sure how those hours in the garage breathing fumes and listening to classic rock at 35 degrees will ultimately impact my personality, but I did get a lot of wood painted – 24 individual pieces I believe. More wood with paint on it. Does it look cold? It was. And boring too. Again with the wood. This is most of it, all together, drying. By now, with the oil paint fumes and all the saw dust from the fabrication, my garage is starting to smell like a real shop. By dang if we don’t have a real project going on here … I decided the blue carpet wasn’t really to my liking and set out to learn about boat carpet and choose a color scheme. I settled on black and tan, as you will see a little later. I ended up buying 25 feet of 16 oz. marine grade carpet in Sahara Tan (ordered online). If you guys are planning on carpeting a 16 foot boat, make sure to get the 25 foot roll of carpet. You will need all of it if you plan to wrap the edges. Oh look, spring has arrived! My Winter of Discontent is over! And it’s time to get some carpet on these newly fabricated, newly painted boards. Here’s my old man (yes the same guy that is building bamboo flyrods with my brother (and yes, he is busy)) applying some two-faced tape to the rear deck before we put on the carpet. The carpet is held to the decking with staples and carpet tacks, the tape is simply to help keep the carpet from “bubbling.” You can see where we’ve cut a hatch so I can get to my fuel tank and there is the hole where I will mount my seat base. Hey, this is starting to come along. This is looking toward the back of the boat from the port side. The new wood, covered in new paint, covered in new carpet, is going into the boat. Looking toward the front of the boat. Remember that extension of the casting deck that I will store my batteries in? You can see it fabricated in this picture. The lid that will be hinged is covered with carpet. There’s two little pieces on the side that are not yet carpeted. You can also see in this picture that we have cut two holes in the front casting deck to create storage compartments. This took a lot of thinking and measuring. Think about it. A boat comes to a point in three dimensions at the front. From bottom to top as the semi V progresses up, horizontally from wide to narrow on the gunwales (beam) and vertically wide to narrow again (from the top of the gunwale to the bottom of the V). Now, my dad and I may not be the smartest guys in the world, but figuring out the maximum size the storage compartments could be took a lot of head scratching and chin rubbing. But I think we got it. The storage compartment doors, the battery box door, and the fuel door will all be hinged with piano hinge that virtually disappears between two pieces of decking. More to come! __________________ "We subscribe to the idea that there's no such thing as failure. There's just giving up. We do not give up. We are relentless." -- The Edge, U2

07-02-2009, 09:11 AM	#2 (permalink)
Slimdog Slimdog is already suffering from withdrawls... 2008 Catch and Continue Finalist Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: Kearney Certified Youth Fishing Instructor NEFGA Line Recycling Volunteer Posts: 716 Thanks: 417 Thanked 310 Times in 172 Posts	Excellent, Bo! Ready for more!!! Slim __________________ ROADHOUSE!

07-02-2009, 09:41 AM	#3 (permalink)
Chad Chad is finished with #1 Member Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Gone Fishin' Posts: 7,474 Thanks: 366 Thanked 466 Times in 208 Posts Blog Entries: 15	Having fished out of the finished product, I can tell you, it's ALL casting deck. And that's ALL good. Supposedly there was wiring and batteries and gas tanks and other essentials somewhere, but all I saw was an empty space to fish! __________________

07-04-2009, 12:32 PM	#4 (permalink)
jimbosan jimbosan has no status. Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Blair, Nebraska Posts: 2,364 Thanks: 292 Thanked 255 Times in 181 Posts	Very nice, I wish I had the patience to do stuff like that and the skill would be nice as well. __________________ GET EM CLOSE/happiness is a bloody arrow!

07-07-2009, 08:40 PM	#5 (permalink)
JKL JKL is watching the river leave it's banks Director Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: North Bend Certified Youth Fishing Instructor Posts: 1,204 Thanks: 186 Thanked 151 Times in 115 Posts	Very nice bo...I think I might have to do a winter project with mine __________________ "I have no vampire experience, but I have hunted werewolves. I shot one once, but by the time I got there, it had turned back into my neighbor's dog." Dwight Schrute

07-12-2009, 12:09 PM	#6 (permalink)
cougarw cougarw is wondering what to do next. Member Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: In the wild Posts: 2,213 Thanks: 162 Thanked 204 Times in 133 Posts	Very nice. I redid one of my boats one time, so I know how much work and time you spent on it. It's all worth it when it done.

07-13-2009, 09:05 PM	#7 (permalink)
jarredbehrendt jarredbehrendt is Dreaming of Paradise Member Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Omaha, NE for now.... Certified Youth Fishing Instructor Posts: 2,476 Thanks: 602 Thanked 406 Times in 304 Posts Blog Entries: 68	Looks pretty sweet Bo! __________________ Fish when you can...... Work when you have to.

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