How to make your Carver go faster!

[hardchines]

I have written a couple of posts on my conversion of a 26 Carver Santa Cruz with a V8 fully capable of getting on and maintaining a clean plane over to a baby long range cruiser capable of a cruise speed of 6.1 MPH! One of the projects I did not get to over the last 2 plus years of rebuilding this yacht was the removal of 37 years of bottom paint and adding one thin coat of new paint in its place. Two months ago I decided it was time to do this most disagreeable job I also wanted to replace all 64 rollers on my boat trailer as well as replacing the entire brake system plus a conversion to disc brakes.

After a incredible amount of work scrapping the bottom of the boat by hand with a 2.5 inch scrapper, I would vacuum up the old paint off my driveway with a shop vac., I could not believe how heavy the vacuum had become, I opened it up the first time to find it filled to the top, I repeated the filling and emptying 3 more times before the boat was cleaned off, I captured 128 lbs of old paint it is unknown how much paint I lost as I worked in front of a commercial floor fan blowing on me through out the scrapping process !!

I repainted the bottom of the boat and did all trailer work, the boat was actually capable of being winched 2 feet on the trailer with the new rollers, very happy as it would not move a inch before the rollers were changed! I now wonder if the removal of the very rough thick paint from the bottom will have any effect on my cruise speed, who knows maybe I can get her up to 6.2 MPH!

[Viper]

Sweet

[km1125]

The downside is that you removed all that weight below the CG, so your boat will now be more 'tippy'!!!

j/k!!!



I know that's a lot of work. Several years ago I also chipped off all the old paint and repainted!!

[mjk1040]

A job well done, hope the rewards are abound! Viper has used my sayin! SWEEET!

[tomschauer]

Maybe you should install a safety ignition cutoff lanyard incase you lose control at that speed!

[hardchines]

Thx guys, its great to have that job behind me, Tomschauer lets be serious, at my present speed I would be foolish to operate this speed boat without a kill lanyard!

KM1125 I thought about the CG change, so I installed a ice maker and 30 additional bottles of tonic water under the cabin sole with the 450 pounds of lead ballast and my lightning rod redirect system, and there is still room for for the Gin !