Another BFN Rebuild

thats what friends are for, ive even seen a few cat fights along the way

You say "really sparkly" to Tim and his immediate response is "Oh yeah, LED lights for the trailer...good idea."

Tim, when's everything going to go back in the boat? Motor done yet?

TRBenj wrote: GL is a definite. Whose wedding are we talking about anyways?

We'll have to order up some weather like last year for you! Good to hear you'll be making the trip this summer. Hopefully you'll be bringing the BFN along.....many of us will be anxious to see it in person.

.......for a few posts back there, I thought I'd missed a big announcement.....thanks for clearing that up.

Haha, thanks Pete- I owe you one!

Nice! Those do look amazing!   

Looks good Tim!

8122pbrainard wrote: Now, get back to work on the boat!

Ha, yes sir!

The strut went on last night... other than sanding down the keel where I had put some thickened resin, thats all we managed to get done. At least we're happy with the alignment. Ill have to post some pictures of the "massaged" strut.

Im hoping to do another round of filling with thickened resin tonight- the rudder port area in particular was pretty beat up.

Looks good. Biggest mistake CC ever made was losing the dual exhausts. What were they thinking?

Probably a stupid question, but are you putting in any kind of mufflers?
just kidding!

TRBenj wrote:    While I dont care for the look of the single exhaust, the new boats sure are quiet- which is sometimes a good thing.

It's pretty much always a good thing if you ski in the mornings on public water.

Tim - did you replace the rope in your rub rail? If so, what did you buy and where.

I am getting ready to remove my rub rail and all other fixtures for compounding, polish and wax so I would like to source the rope now so it will go on when I put the rub rail back on.

Thanks.

Dave

clip out another 60lbs, and give the sister your 10-18??????

TRBenj wrote: ......we're flirting with the 475hp max.

in reality, i would bet it takes 5 horsepower to run the borg and 1 to 2hp to turn the PCM, much smaller pump on the PCM and i can really tell the difference when i spin them on my lathe, the borgs will load the lathe unlike the pcm, the lathe acts as if nothing is on there with the PCM.
Some history on the Borg, in the early days they took what was reffered to as the shuttle box, and a borg warner 4 speed trans that would go into off road brick haulers and the "shuttlebox" was the borg warner up front of the 4 speed t-18 transmission or t-98, of course it did use a Borg and Beck torque converter for slip. But what they did was take that shuttle box and converted the same concept into a marine trans, thus very rugged and durable, the pump is about 4 times as big as the PCM and moves that much more oil which does rob HP, like a high volume oil pump in an engine. this transmission set up allowed 4 reverse speeds and 4 forward speeds with 1st being a creeper gear

A few updates... we're still putting on hardware.

The bilge drain, fins and water pick up are on.









The new strut took a bit of massaging to get just right. The baseplate was significantly thicker (almost 1/8"!) than the original, and the angle was off enough where we would have had to shim it significantly in order to line it up with the shaft log... so we took a grinder to it instead. You can see that baseplate is a good 1/16" or so thicker at the rear.



Mounted and 5200'd in:



In the meantime, the keel needed to be cleaned up quite a bit. It looked like the fins had been knocked off and remounted a few times, so we had some extra holes to fill and smooth. The area aft of the strut was also really beat up- probably due to the minimal clearance (~1/4") the original 13x15 Federal had. The rudder port was particularly bad... and at some point someone installed a metal plate between the strut and rudder to hide the damage- so those screw holes needed to be filled too. This picture was taken last year:



After a few rounds of filling and sanding, it looked like this:



It ended up coming out pretty decent. It needs gel to look good, but the running surface is now 100% better.





While I was underneath the boat working with the thickened resin, I noticed that there was a pretty big gap between the shaft log and hull- it looks like it was never bedded properly from the factory. That gap got filled in while I was under there.



This afternoon we finished 5200'ing the exhaust tips, and put on the platform brackets as well.







The speedo tubes got sealed in as well. We were going to put on the pitots and trim pieces for the tubing, as well as the bilge pump outlets, but I wasnt happy with how they looked. Im going to search for some better looking pieces (new/used) before buttoning up the transom.