88Rocket

Long story short I worked at sunsation when I was 17-18 I'm now 45 so many years ago. at the time they only built the Rocket and I enjoyed working there and learned a lot. always wanted one but never went and got one you know kids and life get in the way. well a week before labor day I browsed CL looking for one and found one in Michigan for sale and liked the low price so off I went to get it did a marathon drive to Michigan from Georgia left Friday night at 8:30 and was back home Saturday night at 10:30 to say the least the boat was rough. Motor was blown. oil everywhere in cockpit, cabin had been redone and not well I might add. first order of business was clean everything to see what I had to work with. then pulled the motor. it had 6 of 8 rods spun and the mains were not much better. so in search of a new motor well it turned out it was cheaper to rebuild it so I did reworked crank 30 over pistons, swapped the peanut heads for 049 heads performer intake, and basically everything else is brand new in the motor
so I decided to yank out everything all the carpet and headliner so basically the boat was gutted I had found many wires leading to no where so I traced all of them down what wasn't being used was pulled out.
New dash panel was made, all new lights , new radio and speakers, new cabin doors, new headliner , new carpet, New courtesy lights in cockpit, new cabin lights new rope lights, fixed the rear seat it had been painted , I now have just about everything to put it back together. and can't get it to stop raining here in Georgia. one thing I have been trying to find out is what was the original front seat sizes for the wood .

Here's some photos













theres more photos but don't want to flood the first post

jekyl

Looks Great

AWOL

Need more pics

88Rocket

Best way to do pics since it doesn't look like you can attach pics is here

https://goo.gl/photos/cVaJQMc98gC9XUDEA

88Rocket

So far I have stripped out the whole cabin removed the carpet from the cockpit wall sides and then removed the glue added 2 LED courtesy lights on drivers side need to add 2 to the passenger side. also need to add 2 red led lights to the passenger side. for night driving the red LED's to save night vision and the white for when people need to get off. the boat came with 2 red lights on the drivers side for couresy lights I'm just adding to it by adding 2 to the passenger side and then adding white on separate switch. the cabin light was gone so I bought one that will be installed when the headliner is put back in. I bought all new lights for the bow and stern. I bought vents to replace the old dated chrome vents on the back of the deck . I bought all new headliner and carpet for the whole boat. replaced the nonworking Kenwood radio with a boss marine radio and bought 4 new speakers 2 for the rear seat and 2 for the front of the cockpit. those have been installed already. the rear hatch weighted about 100 pounds it was soaking wet and delaminated so I pulled off all the balsa and cleaned it up Bought some 3/4 ply to laminate back in. the past couple of weeks I have had bronchitis and had a few teeth removed so I have been down and not able to work on it to much. I did manage to sand the whole cabin area down so that I can glass up a few things in the cabin and then install the new headliner. I made new cabin doors the old ones were made out of Plexiglass 1/2 inch thick and they broke a lot well this boat was no exception so I had 2 boards cut up of starboard and made new doors. also under the rear seat there was a board that was 1/2 inch ply I replaced it also with starboard. same with the porta potty lid in the cabin was made of 1/2 inch ply covered in vinyl so I replaced it in starboard too. the front cabin liner was never glassed in as this boat was one of the early boat it was just put in with a bondo like substance so when I worked there we started glassing that in instead of just the bondo stuff so I will be glassing it in too. and the front bulkhead the ply pulled away from the glass tabs it was held in with so I will be reglassing that. the wiring was a mess when I got the boat so I have redone most of it I will be repainting the deck white because summer here in Georgia a black boat will not be fun. I will be also painting the bottom white but leaving the hull sides Black. here is the plan for the graphics

88Rocket

Baja170

Looks good. Nice work!

88Rocket

Thank you .

bigboat28

Very nice.

TBAG

Nice project but I say leave the black hull sieds as is, I'm not really feeling that color scheme. Just my opinion!