1956 Collegian restoration

Well the time has come to get started on the next project so I headed down to the barn at Todd's place on Saturday to get the Collegian ready for the trip home. This boat has had a fairly decent 5200 bottom job about 10 years ago so the plan is to get it to my shop and flip the boat so we can inspect, repair, and paint the bottom.

After that were going to pull the sides off the boat, replace the inner planking with plywood and rehang the original outer planking. The deck looks decent but does have some issues so there will be some repair work there as well.

The plan for power is to swap this 292 Y block Interceptor with the 302 PCM that is in #1, that way this boat gets good reliable power and #1 gets the correct engine for that boat. The freeze plugs on the 292 are popped so we don't really know if we have a good block to work with but I do have a complete 272 motor for #1 so between the two I should be able to make one out them. More on that later when we get those off to the machine shop.

So the boat got home Saturday night, Sunday I power washed the bilge and got it off the trailer. Hope to start pulling hardware off next week and get it ready to flip.







Bilge cleaned up real nice and the bottom job looks decent


In her new home for the next couple of years

illiniball2000 wrote: I look forward to following along. Always impressed with your work.

Thanks Brian, Looks like we got it inside without a day to spare, the scene outside that doorway looks quite different this morning! Yesterday we were raking leaves today we're shoveling snow LOL

Still using Opel for machine work Alan? This project, by the look of the pictures, does not look as daunting as some of your others. Is this project more on your own since it’s at your house?

Makes sense on the travel for sure. I just had Ted just do some work for me, done when he said it would be.

I've got a couple of days worth of work on the boat now. First was to remove all hardware, interior, engine bay stuff. Someone either didn't trust this boat or was over the top safety conscious because it had 2 batteries, 2 bilge pumps, 2 blowers and 3 fire extinguishers in it. they also spent a lot of time rewiring the entire boat, it looks serviceable and I should be able to keep most of it.


Then I started striping varnish, knocking bungs out and removing screws. This was a little bit of a bitch because the boat has been refastened at some point and the bungs were glued in pretty good, original bungs pop right out but these new ones are a bugger. I ended up fashioning two small chisels out of some nail sets and that works good but it's still time consuming. So after one full day I'm about half way through one side, it's coming apart without too much trouble yet

Jumping in for the ride as well

Making some headway on the port side, all the wood is off and stem and chine landings are cleaned up. All looks good there, nice and solid.   
.

So after getting the sides cleaned up I decided to investigate the transom and see how sound it was. I pulled the bottom plank and found what I expected. The transom was replaced but they did not replace the inner ply so it was original and in need of a trash bag.






The lower frame and both side frames will have to get replaced. I'll get the rest of the transom off on the next garage day and see what the rest of the framework looks like. All in all a very productive couple of days.

The transom was a bugger to get apart, any time you're working with a repaired boat the task is going to take you twice as long because of 5200 and epoxy. Todd came up for the day to help out and it took us about half a day to get that transom apart without destroying everything. I was trying to save as much as possible to use for templates. Most of it came out in bits but we were able to come up with enough to use as templates later. Went to the lumber yard Sunday to grab a few sticks of lumber to rebuild the transom. I also have some leftover wood from the Hurricane and Todd dropped off some nice planks left over from the Commuter that we'll use to replace some of the side planking. May be on to a good name for her "Pot Luck"

81nautique wrote: May be on to a good name for her "Pot Luck"

Or maybe "Mish Mash" "Miss Mash"

Looking good Alan but we wouldn't expect anything less from you Master Magicman.

JoeinNY wrote: I think you have this all wrong, Obviously CorrectCraft was way ahead of the competition here. First they located the weight in the boat perfectly to ensure it was level while riding down the lake with the average size male in the drivers seat, then they painstakingly found the exact center of gravity of the boat to know where to install the lifting ring. Then they designed the asymmetrical rear deck around the lifting ring location using a perfect vanishing point perspective so that without a ruler one would never know the back deck was not perfectly symmetric.   Truly nautical art, I am surprised you didn’t appreciate it right away.

If anyone could make sense of it I knew it would be Joe!

Started working on the transom framework. Had to build a steam box. Nothing fancy, just some scraps from previous projects and an old garment steamer.



Then built a buck matching the transom radius to bend the frame pieces. I don't think Correct Craft steamed these when they built the boat because there were just layers upon layers of ring nails holding it together, seems like they just added a piece and nailed the crap out of it, repeat.


I decided to go with the same approach I did on the Hurricane which was to laminate the frame pieces together with epoxy. Fitted the pieces individually and then built some temporary framework into the transom to fasten to while the epoxy cures.

This massive engine hatch is a problem I'm going to have to address sooner than later. It probably weighs 40-50 lbs.


I can see where it slammed open at one time, I'm assuming the chain and little #8 screw that was holding it pulled out of the frame and let it slam on the deck. The wood around the hinges is all broken away from that.

Then once I got under the deck I noticed that it also slammed closed because that frame member is also broken. This thing is so heavy I won't feel comfortable with it until I come up with some way to prevent that from happening again. Maybe try to hide a gas shock somewhere. I have time to figure it out but I don't want anyone's missing fingers on my conscience

Open to suggestions from the engineering crowd.   

8122pbrainard wrote: How to size and select gas shocks

Thanks for the chart Pete, That will be helpful. Any other ideas other than gas shocks? I hate the idea of putting them on but I can't leave this hatch as it is.

Is it out of the question to split the hatch? How’s the Hurricane configured?

That does look like a heavy beast.

How about some old window weights and pulleys? More period correct?