Turning the ugliest boat in Costa Rica into a respectable 28' Center Console Diesel

[GringoJohn]

Never been in the hammock, it's full of glass dust, so that would be a nap you would pay for!

[GringoJohn]

I was hoping to have the inside painted today, but it looks like it's not going to happen until maybe tomorrow if we work Sunday or Monday. I was in Panama again yesterday, and the guys thought it would be funny to make the fairing compound pink.













It's getting much closer to paint though, should have all the fairing done today. Here's a little trick I'm sure somebody can use. When fairing round things like our hatches, we take a hole saw and cut out pieces of wood at whatever diameter we need, then drill a hole in the middle and put a carriage bolt through it and contact cement on sandpaper. Check out the pics:









And then it's funny, you can tell the mold was a male mold, because there is almost no fairing on the inside walls

[GringoJohn]

Well, we are now officially ready to paint the inside. Tomorrow should post pictures, today we got the outside papered so we don't overspray. The hatch openings in the floor were pretty hard to get the way we wanted them, and that's how we spent the last two days, just sanding and touching up, but tomorrow we should have the inside painted up.

[GringoJohn]

Finally got the inside painted!











We spent a ton of time in prep getting the floor hatches right, here’s a close up of on of them. The frame on the bottom isn’t 100 percent perfect, but when the hatch is closed you won’t see that.



And then we cleaned up the hatch themselves and glassed them



And then made a box that the toilet will sit on



In the pictures, the boat looks dirty because we painted yesterday, but today the are changing the roof and it’s dropping rust and dirt everywhere. But the Gelcoat was dry before, and is clean.



When they finish the roof, I’ll shoot some more pictures with the boat clean. Getting closer! Details now. One day this week, I’m going to hang the motor where it goes and build the motor mounts. More pictures coming!

[keakar]

simply amazing how much unseen work goes into making a baot

[Matt G]

I know it's been said in here before, but this is the coolest thread. I never realized the work that goes into building a boat.

[GringoJohn]

Thanks guys!

[B-Stealth]

Super cool thread; I appreciate your dedication to document the steps. I would love to know how many hours y'all will have in the boat when your finished. My guess would be 700-1,000 hours.

[GringoJohn]

Originally Posted by B-Stealth

Super cool thread; I appreciate your dedication to document the steps. I would love to know how many hours y'all will have in the boat when your finished. My guess would be 700-1,000 hours.

We started it like on 6-23, but spent two weeks before that making the mold, so I don't count that. So from 6-23 until now that is exactly 3 months or 90 days, we didn't work Sundays so that gets us to 77 days of work. We work from 8 to 5 on normal days, so that's 770 hours, and we have 2.5 people working (I haven't been too involved in the paint prep as I've been busy on other things, and crab is drunk ALOT) on it so that's 1900 hours so far

[B-Stealth]

Originally Posted by GringoJohn

We started it like on 6-23, but spent two weeks before that making the mold, so I don't count that. So from 6-23 until now that is exactly 3 months or 90 days, we didn't work Sundays so that gets us to 77 days of work. We work from 8 to 5 on normal days, so that's 770 hours, and we have 2.5 people working (I haven't been too involved in the paint prep as I've been busy on other things, and crab is drunk ALOT) on it so that's 1900 hours so far

Wow, I didn't realize y'all were hitting it that hard. If you don't mind me asking what do you think the boats value will be upon completion?

[GringoJohn]

Originally Posted by B-Stealth

Wow, I didn't realize y'all were hitting it that hard. If you don't mind me asking what do you think the boats value will be upon completion?

Not for sale I didn't build it to sell it, so i haven't really put much thought into that. There is another boat here in Quepos that a guy just restored, and it's nowhere on this level of quality materials or weight savings (like he just painted the boat nicely but redo it per say), and it's outboard powered, and he just sold that boat for 46K. It was a nice boat and I think the guy buying it is getting a good boat, but it's nowhere near the level of this one in power to weight ratio, or build quality (just because it was an all mold boat, built to make profit not using the best techniques). But i wouldn't sell this one unless somebody offered too much money for it. And even then I would reluctant.

[GringoJohn]

Originally Posted by B-Stealth

Wow, I didn't realize y'all were hitting it that hard. If you don't mind me asking what do you think the boats value will be upon completion?

After thinking about it a little more, I just wouldn't want this boat competing against my charter boats out there, so i don't think I would sell it at all. Weight to power ratio plays a HUGE factor in the amount of bites you get here fishing for billfish, so it's going to be a cheap to run fish catching machine, and I don't want my competitors to get their hands on it. Not even for 100K

It plays such a big role, that I'm not even going to use my 32 footer for the first half of the season because it's high weight makes it suck at catching billfish (my 32 footer is the boat in my avatar). It was done with plywood and polyester resin, and the last season as the floor got heavier from water intrusion, it's catch rate went way down. We are about to rip it apart and cut it's weight down by 4000-5000 pounds so it can get competitive again. On the other hand, my 30 foot gamefisherman we redid with corecell foam and carbon fiber, and then last season it averaged 3 more billfish releases PER DAY from the weight reduction (my lightweight 30 footer averaged 12.4 sailfish released per day as opposed to 4.6 sailfish per day on the heavy fiberglass boat). This new 28 footer we are building here is going to clean house I bet, so i got to keep it for myself

My 32 footer is the next build we are going to post up here. We are stripping the 32 all the way down to the hull, even taking out the bulkheads, and then it is double layered on all the sides (it's cheaper to build them using a mold for each side, but it's heavier) so that second layer is GONE. It's going to be amazing all the weight that is going to come out, and we are going to do everything with this lightweight foam core. I bet i double the catch per day numbers from last year. Stay tuned

Here is a prelim plan of what we are thinking for the 32 footer. I'm going to take out the center console and make a cabin up front. That should shift a little more weight to the back as the cabin is just going to be a foam cored top with just a bathroom inside, but mostly weightless. Now the front has all these hatches made out of plywood and weighs a ton. Here's my Engineer's drawing (me using paint):

[swamp snorkler]

Originally Posted by GringoJohn

After thinking about it a little more, I just wouldn't want this boat competing against my charter boats out there, so i don't think I would sell it at all. Weight to power ratio plays a HUGE factor in the amount of bites you get here fishing for billfish, so it's going to be a cheap to run fish catching machine, and I don't want my competitors to get their hands on it. Not even for 100K

It plays such a big role, that I'm not even going to use my 32 footer for the first half of the season because it's high weight makes it suck at catching billfish (my 32 footer is the boat in my avatar). It was done with plywood and polyester resin, and the last season as the floor got heavier from water intrusion, it's catch rate went way down. We are about to rip it apart and cut it's weight down by 4000-5000 pounds so it can get competitive again. On the other hand, my 30 foot gamefisherman we redid with corecell foam and carbon fiber, and then last season it averaged 3 more billfish releases PER DAY from the weight reduction (my lightweight 30 footer averaged 12.4 sailfish released per day as opposed to 4.6 sailfish per day on the heavy fiberglass boat). This new 28 footer we are building here is going to clean house I bet, so i got to keep it for myself

My 32 footer is the next build we are going to post up here. We are stripping the 32 all the way down to the hull, even taking out the bulkheads, and then it is double layered on all the sides (it's cheaper to build them using a mold for each side, but it's heavier) so that second layer is GONE. It's going to be amazing all the weight that is going to come out, and we are going to do everything with this lightweight foam core. I bet i double the catch per day numbers from last year. Stay tuned

Here is a prelim plan of what we are thinking for the 32 footer. I'm going to take out the center console and make a cabin up front. That should shift a little more weight to the back as the cabin is just going to be a foam cored top with just a bathroom inside, but mostly weightless. Now the front has all these hatches made out of plywood and weighs a ton. Here's my Engineer's drawing (me using paint):

Thats a pretty interesting thing the power tow weight ratio.

Alsp, it looks like they need to change the rafters on that roof too!

[GringoJohn]

There is a T Top on my truck! Tubes came in, I got them from Eastern Metal Supply in Florida, and they actually dropped them off in person for free at my freight forwarder in Miami. Great service. It looks like my rod holders, the ones that we were going to weld on, got stolen though. The freight people are looking for them, but I don't have high hopes. It was quite a trip from the capital to here at night with 23 foot tubes on the truck, poor truck, it's been abused alot lately. We ended up going with polished sch 40 aluminum tubing, I don't remember which number, but this is the one that bends easy. Here's some pictures of the tubes on my truck! I have a buyer for the boat we found in the ocean, hopefully they will pay by the end of the week, and if they do we're going to start getting this tower put together!

[GringoJohn]

Ok, in the morning today, Harold sanded the inside of the console to put on the microballons to fair it out. Sanding inside stinks.





After that, he went home and showered and me and harold decided we were tired of sanding and wanted to do something more fun. So I paid a couple of guys to run the orbitals today on the outside while me and harold built stuff, but more on that later. During the sanding, we learned something awesome on our last restoration. We used to wet sand with 400 grit by hand with the blocks to get all the eggshell out. That's what I was always told was necessary. Sanding by hand is stupid hard though. What we learned, is you can do the worst part, the 400 grit, with just velcro disks and an orbital. The rest you have to block sand, but the 400 with the orbital saves YEARS of sanding. Here's the unlucky soul that we put up to sand the outside with the orbital. He got done in just one day though, but he burned about 75 disks.





You can REALLY tell the difference after the 400 grit goes around. This is a picture before the border was sanded, and you can see the eggshell on the border, but how flat the sides came out:





Ok, while the sanding people were suffering, i had fun with my new radio that just came in. It's bluetooth so customers can play music from their phones while they fish. Technology is soo cool, they didn't have this kind of stuff when I was growing up





I went ahead and cut the holes to mount the speakers in the bottom of the overhead electronics box.





And then we stuck the speakers in to "make sure they fit"!









I really like the speakers. They are Fusion 200 watt 6.5 inchers, so they will sound good, but they are relly plain on the outside so they don't draw too much attention.

While I was playing with the speakers, Harold wanted to paint the inside of the live well black. Fish like black better, I don't know why, but they live alot longer when they are in the dark?





And then since there weren't anymore fun projects on this boat we could do, we decided to build some corecell/carbon fiber electronics boxes for my 30 and 32 foot boats. They both have boxes like this up in the tower were the gauges, gps, sonar and vhf goes. Right now I just this mold that looks like this, but each box weight about 35 pounds. The new boxes will weigh in at 3 pounds, so that will be 32 pounds times 4 boxes so we're taking 128 pounds out of the boat, or a small passenger. Not bad, but materials for the two boxes will be around 400 bucks, or 100 bucks a box. I also had a problem with the old heavy boxes cracking the aluminium supports that holds them up, making the boxes weightless will get rid of that problem. I started by tracing the big box we are using in the new "Quepos 28"





Then I did that 8 times. Then I put the sides I am going to use together and sanded them so they are exactly the same. I did this for all four pairs.





Then we measure out the other top bottom and back and cut those out.









Then we use cabosil and resin to make glue and start putting them together

















You can see on the last picture we used nails to hold them together while the glue dries. Should be dry in about an hour and then I'm going to put the back on, sand them down and put on the carbon fiber, I'm waiting for them to dry now...

[GringoJohn]

And here's the end of the day. The two guys that aren't Harold started at the transom and this is a finishing shot. Today they got the whole outside with 400 grit, it was mostly the guy on the left, but crab and Harold helped out at the end. Tomorrow they'll hit the outside with 600 grit on the orbital, and then do the inside. Then we will hit the outside with 2000 by hand with water to get the shine out, and then use the buffer with 2K compound and it should be super shiny





And then while the guys finished up the sanding, i took two of the new boxes over to the tower which is off of my 32 footer to see how they looked! Tomorrow I'll have the carbon on them and probably a layer of fairing compound. Right now they weigh less than a pound per box, it's pretty cool. It was tough because the wind kept blowing them off, and there was no wind today hardly.

[PotLikinisAhabbit]

When I grow up I wanna live this life^

[wishin i was fishin]

Super awesome GringoJohn!

Thank you for sharing this with us.

[GringoJohn]

Not much to look at on the build, there were two guys that sanded all day on the inside with 400 grit and orbitals. Looks much better in real life, but in the pictures you can't make out what's going on. BUT, I had a pretty good day on the boxes for my 32 footer. First we sanded them down to give them an even rounded look. Sanding them down, we used a small board and 36 grit. The pace is slowing, I think Harold's getting worn out, and I know I'm beat. We'll probably take the next week slow so we can get some air. He's the pictures from today.

We started with rounding the edges with a board and 36 grit:









Then cut the carbon fiber





and we did the inside first. This will make more sense on the next post, but we're going to put the face on it Monday and it's going to be hard to get to the inside, so we have to do the inside first.





and then I put it in the Costa Rican sun to post cure, and black gets really really hot. It was neat though, it was super heated, but it's so light that it has a low specific gravity and although you can feel it's hot, it won't burn you like a wrench or drill you leave in the sun.

[Matt G]

Originally Posted by PotLikinisAhabbit

When I grow up I wanna live this life^

Truer words have never been spoken.