I’m seriously thinking about naming her…
Brand new transom, actually. Made it myself out of LVL (laminated veneer lumber, used for support beams under buildings) and john boat paint. Reminds me, it needs a bit of touch-up. It’s not treated or water-resistant, but I gave it a reasonably thick skin of john boat spray paint… I need to give it a bit more in a couple spots.
They called me and basically said that I needed a new transom that I could make myself or pay them to make, or make myself, or I could just make it myself, OR they wouldn’t mind if I made one myself and brought it to them… so I figured I’d do them a favor and made one myself using the old one as a pattern.
As far as the VRO, it’s non-functional. I’m mixing in the tank… and right now I’m mixing at 25:1, so she’s a bit chuggy and smoky. I’ll be interested to see what it’s like at 50:1 after my first 4 tanks of gas…
It sure looks sharp hanging off the back of the boat tho.
I LOVE ELECTRIC TILT/TRIM!! After 3 years of “flip the lever, lift the motor. flip the lever, lift the motor, drop the motor.” I couldn’t be happier to have a tilt/trim motor that I can use to get the pontoon boat into, yanno, areas where the water’s like 16-18 ” deep. You know, on the river, where the water’s really shallow, but then it ‘s suddenly deeper again?
Cool part: in the pontoon boat nobody needs to get out and push. 
Also really nice for shallow landings like Medicine Lake.
Funny story. When I picked the boat up from RM, I went straight to the 494 P2 landing, dropped her in the water and spend about an hour trying to get the motor started. We had been tinkering around with the gas line just before I left the marine shop because I had leaks around the connector housing on the tank, the tank end of the hose, the bulb, AND the engine end of the hose. But once I got to the water it ran for about 45 seconds, killed and wouldn’t start again.
After, like I said, an hour or more of troubleshooting, we started breaking down the gas line. Took off the motor end and the bulb was working… it finally turned out that the kid that did the installation of the fuel line parts had missed a bit of shrink wrap when he took the motor end of the hose out of the packaging, so there was a big wad of shrink wrap stuffed inside the fuel line just outside the motor.
Pulled it out, put the end back on, squeezed the bulb about 50 times (that carb holds a LOT of gas!) and she started right up.
I need to swing into RM today and let them know about that… they did a good job for the most part but they also cost me an evening’s fishing! lol
The only issue I’m having is that it throws a TON of hard spray up between the motor and the starboard pontoon, but little to nothing in between the motor and the port pontoon. Visual inspection, everything looks OK. It’s really perplexing, especially since at speed it looks like it really wants to tear the fuel line right off the boat.
So I’m thinking of using some sort of cover for the gap between the transom mount and the pontoon, which could possibly give me space for some cargo boxes back there, too…
Any thoughts on that?
