Hello All,
Great to be here...was a lurker for awhile, but have been the recipient of many good ideas and how-tos. I bought THE FLYING PIG about a year ago from King Salmon Marine. It's a 1996 Sea Ranger '19, with a 2010 Evinrude E-TEC which had 60 hours on it.
As all boats are, this one was a money sump as well to get her into the shape I wanted...so here's a brief list:
1) Trailer upgrades, brakes, electric winch, new rollers, and LED lights
2) The dash was full of old holes from the previous engine, so I bought a thick piece of vinyl and redid the dash to clean it up.
3) Rewired the whole boat. The old wiring looked like a rat's nest, and I actually found a wire leading to the aft switch for the washdown water tank clipped together with two alligator clips. Fearing a friggin' fire, I decided to do it all the right way.
4) Added mounts for downriggers, and my home made crabpot puller.
5) New LOWRANCE Elite 7 fishfinder
6) Added a T-Top from Atlantic Towers. This was a PITA, and while the quality of the product is good, the fitment needed a little "adjusting". Fortunately, I have a good friend who's smarter than me on such things, and we essentially pulled the structure apart wide enough, and past the yield point of the metal so it would fit width wise.
7) To keep momma warm, I ended up getting new canvas made to fit the T-Top. I met a guy at the Seattle boat show last year, and had him look at the boat. He offers polycarbonate windows as an upgrade, which I elected to buy after years of really disliking isinglass. While I doubt I'd do it, he says he has customers that run windshield wipers on the stuff. He was very easy to work with, and made many suggestions.....even picked out the colors of the canvas to match the Evinrude's logo.
I'm sure I missed something, but pics are in my gallery.
Also after looking and learning from this site, am going to add another bildge pump, and I want to upgrade the seats to the tempress elite high back helm seats. If any of you have any experience with those, I'm all ears.
