Paragon Replica

My father, uncle, and I love the look of the early 90's Paragons. Four to five years ago we began looking for one but there were only a couple that came up for sale during that time and they wanted around $40,000 for each. We didn't want to pay that so we decided to build our own.

We started out with a 1996 closed bow Nautique with the GT-40 engine that we bought in 2011 and began the conversion process in 2012. We completed the project here in July of 2014 and I thought I would post some pictures of how it came out, explain what we did, and answer any questions someone might have if they wanted to tackle this, or any part of what we did, themselves. Overall we are very happy with how it came out and hope this may be an inspiration for someone else to try the same thing. Our boat is by no means an exact replica - we changed some things to look how we wanted and it doesn't have any actual Paragon badging, but feel it came out looking very Paragon-like.

One of my other reasons for wanting to put some information out on this site is when my dad and I first began researching the Paragon, there wasn't much information out there on these boats. We spent quite a bit of time scoring the internet for pictures and information to gather ideas on how to attempt to replicate the look. Hopefully these pictures and information help somebody someday if you try to do the same thing or something similar.          

There is so much to talk about on this project I'm not quite sure where to start. I'll post a few pictures here to start and when time allows over the coming weeks try to explain in a little more detail what we did. For today I'll start out with a few before and after pictures, and in the weeks ahead I will try to take and post some better pictures.

Steve




Before...