I am truly humbled once again to read a post like this,,Thank you for letting me serve you, it was indeed a privilege!
Thanks everyone for the kind words, I know I about drove Kevin nuts as I was sending him pictures with every little goal reached and some of the goals were tough to get accomplished before days end!
Some of the rigging was a nightmare, it had never had a kicker before and I was left with mounting a bracket to a virgin hull, I about wore out a level checking and rechecking to make sure it was as close to being as perfect as I could get it, then there was what to do with a control mounting hole that had been butchered with two different brands of controllers, OMC and Mercury, and now a Suzuki but I won! thank goodness for engineered marine plastic and it matched the rest of the black in the boat nicely.
Adding the hydraulic jack plate was no big deal,,,,until it came time to mount the blinker switches, I had put the steering column back together after mounting the switch plate and started wiring it up and low and behold, only the down side of the trim worked, wth????
I moved on to other projects within the boat and text Kevin that a switch was bad and I had ordered another one but the original switch wouldnt let me rest so I went back in after it, removed the steering wheel again and switched the wires with the jack plate switch, same dang thing, WTH now!!
Long story short, somewhere in the harness,, the wire colors were switched within the harness, I dont know if someone was being a smartass at the factory or if they ran out of wire during a production run and started with a new color or what but the green wire and the pink wire were switched, this was in the Atlas plate harness not the Suzuki harness, if it had been I would have swapped harnesses to make it right.
There are a lot of stories of this project as it went along and I had a blast doing each thing I did and I had fun teasing Kevin with pics, especially when I fired the motors for the first time.
And of course when I was satisfied with it and worrying that I was going to make the owner happy, I could not rest yet, I just had to put the finishing touches on it,, I vacuumed about ten times, polished everything above the water line until my elbows hurt and waited with nervous anticipation.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT WE DID?? we took it to a lake to give it a quick run and got it all dirty again!!!
The lake was like chocolate milk, full trees floating everywhere, and of course we got rained on on the way back to the dock, this was three days after Kellogg Iowa received anywhere from ten to thirteen inches of rain overnight depending on what end of town you were on and we were flooded out, I kid you not, I could have rolled Kevins boat out of the door about ten feet and floated it off of the trailer, heck we could have give it a spin around my shop!!!!!!
The smile said it all, that was enough for me.
Folks, I live by simple rules, one of those rules is this, always give it your best, and if that isnt good enough,,try again, make sure the man you charged for work is happy even if it costs you a couple of extra hours, that man and his friends will be back.
Dutchboy, thanks for stopping by!! always a pleasure to see you sir! and you timed it perfectly as I needed that break!
