Earlier this year I bought a boat off of ebay. It was one of those Boat Angels auctions where people donate the boat and all proceeds go to the charity. Well, I bid $150 thinking there was no way I would ever win it and guess what.. I won it.

It's a 1977 18' Bonanza OMC 175 HP with a Ford 302 engine.

So, suddenly I had to explain to Holly why I bought this thing and what we were going to do with it. Obviously, for $150, it was pretty rough, but I started to work on it.

Here are pictures!

This is a really abridged description of everything I've done. A lot of trial and error and I decided to just mentioned what worked instead of all the things that didn't. :)

The first thing I did was change the oil... I figured if there was water or something in the oil, then no reason to go any further. Surprisingly, everything looked great.

At first, I couldn't get it to crank over, and replaced the starter solenoid and it turned over like a dream. But, it wouldn't fire.

So, I pulled the wire between the coil and the distributor cap (randomizer) and the end was bad... New set of plug wires and plugs and the engine fired right up.

The next thing was to replace (or put together) the lower unit. Buying a rebuilt lower unit is about $800, which is more then I wanted (or could) spend.. so I put out an ad on Craig's list and found the entire outdrive for $100. Good thing I did, because my upper unit was bad as well (seals pretty much gone).

Putting everything back together, I found some stripped screws, so I had to drill them out, put in a liner, and replace.. so that was working.

I also discovered during this process that the boot around the intermediary housing was bad, luckily that unit I bought for $100 came with a basically new boot, so problem solved.

The only real way to test this is to stick the butt of the boat in the water and see what happens. I found a water leak around the housing (I hadn't tightened the band holding the boot tightly enough) and the engine was running hot, but the biggest problem was water pouring out of the engine. Looking, I could see that a freeze plug had popped out. And of course, the one that popped out was behind something nearly impossible to get at, without taking the whole engine out. :(

My little bilge pump could barely keep up with all the water coming in... so good thing I left it on the trailer.

So, I brought the boat back up the house, tightened up the band and started messing with the plug. I couldn't pull the old one out, but I could stick a screw driver in, so I pried it back into place.

Also, I put in a new toggle switch for the gears (That's why the previous owner had ripped apart the lower unit as it stopped shifting... turns out the switch went bad).

So, I just stuck the boat back into the water and all of my water leaks are fixed!! So close!! Unfortunately, the engine is still running hot, so I think I need to rip apart the water pump.. I'll do some more testing first as some of the ports on the pump are capped off, this might be effecting the water flow and causing the problem.

There are two pumps on it.. 1 pulls in water from the lake and the other circulates around the engine. so I have to figure out which one is bad.


Update!

I was reading the manual tonight and learned normal operating temperature is about 180F. The temp gauge shows 140 in the middle and it goes up to about 210... so 180 looks pretty high. Long story short, I shut off the engine before it ever got up that high, so everything might be working just fine. I'll try it again tomorrow!!