new project / old boat. introducing " 'flite-risk "

['flite-risk]

"It looks as the trolling motor is a RC, meaning can you launch the boat, park the triler and then bring the boat into the dock ?"....

It is remote controlled, but manually deployed, so I have to crawl through the cabin and pop out the hatch to deploy or stow it. It would be difficult to deploy it while standing on shore. That couple inches of cabin height helps alot with getting to the front hatch as well. I haven't used it to move it to the dock without me in it, I'm not sure I'd trust it as the remote range is pretty weak. It does have some nice features like gps anchor mode (spot lock) that will hold a position in light wind or current and I can program it to follow gps courses or set it to hold a specific heading and speed. But like a lot of cheap chinese electronics, the system is glitchy and the software/app on the phone is sometime hard to understand. It is also just barely long enough shaft length for this boat; it runs deep enough in good weather, but as soon as there are any bigger waves the trolling motor prop is bouncing in and out of the water. I probably should have spent the extra money for a minn kota with a longer shaft.

['flite-risk]

some more pics I found. I always liked the one with my old nissan frontier because the perspective really illustrates how small these boats are. A couple of these pictures show how much I shrank the splashwell area (if you already know how big it was originally). The paint looks pretty good from a distance and strategic photos, but anything too close to the paint shows that it is not anything special. The white rustoleum laid down smoother and thinned out much better than the blue did for me and the white hides the roller and brush marks much better than blue, but both turn glossy and cure hard when you use a little enamel hardener in the mix.

['flite-risk]

here's a couple of the bow pulpit I constructed during the build. It is made from pieces of carbon fiber epoxy panels that I trimmed down into interlocking pieces and is tied into the structure of the hull on the inside and outside and covered in fiberglass. It is super overkill bomb-proof strong; you could literally lift the entire boat from a line attached to that pulpit without damaging anything.