Buying an old boat. Our first year experience with a cheap used boat.

hi I'm Wayne the boat guy and in this video I'm going to talk to you about the first year of ownership with our cheap old boat I'm going to talk about what it costs the mistakes I made some of the repairs and upgrades that we did and what you can expect from a cheap old boat in the first year [Music] first of all we got very lucky with our first old boat and when we moved to live close by the water we were like we have to get a boat and we didn't want to spend a whole lot because we were very new to voting and one of the lessons is that you should really buy a cheap old boat first to really find out what type of boat you ultimately want we knew we weren't going to be fishing or anything and so we just wanted a boat for running around in so we bought a 1975 1914 with a 1985 Evinrude motor on there found it on Craigslist it fit the bill and one of the greatest features of it was the texts that read great knockabout for a new boater they were speaking my language because that's exactly what we were and you know as you're learning about boating you know you're gonna not do everything correctly you don't know with proper things to do and so you know having a cheap old boat it's a good way to you know not mess up something really really nice buy as you're running into a pier so we were now the proud owners of our first boat so here are things that cost us money in the first year of ownership your initial expenses are things like your registration your insurance towing insurance safety equipment that includes things like life vests a whistle fire extinguisher all the types of things that are required in your state for safe boating so those are initial expenses that were very easy to calculate and know exactly what we were going to be spending since our boat was cheap the insurance on it wasn't very much we ended up doing six repairs to the boat in the first year and I know that sounds like a lot especially considering the fact that we're just occasional boaters so we had the thing out maybe 2025 times but some of these repairs were because we bought a cheap boat and so that's that I think they're justified the first repair we had was the winch my boat trailer came with a power winch and I couldn't figure out how to get the thing to work I tried and tried and it just seemed like it just didn't work so unfortunately it was the end of the season I was trying to pull it out of the marina and I needed something right away so I ended up buying a fulton f2 winch which was way more expensive and way fancier of a winch and I needed for my little old boat but that's what I could find right away on the shelves in the few places I knew to look right after I had bought the boat so bought one of those and installed that I made a video about it then the next thing it was interesting because it took a while for me to figure out what was going on with it I could smell gas on the boat it was having a lot of trouble starting it was using a lot of fuel and I realized that basically a lot of the fuel lines on the motor were leaking so I replaced all the fuel lines under the cowl hood thing and there was like about six feet of various gauge fuel hoses underneath of there and I replaced every single one of them that fixed all kinds of problems there was no more gas leaking the fuel usage went way down and it ran a whole lot better the next thing I tackled was my boat came with a kicker motor which was a 1965 Evinrude fisherman six horsepower motor and the guy who had the boat before us he used it for fishing and I'll get into more that later on so he had a kicker motor mount bracket on the back with the six horsepower Evinrude fisherman and I couldn't get the admin fishermen to run so I took it off and did a lot of work to that got that all fixed up and running primarily its problem was there was some water in the fuel want it to be awhile to figure that out I made a video about that motor as well I ultimately took that motor off the back of the boat and I don't use that anymore next one is kind of a big one it was the trailer and looking back I really probably should have tried to find a better used trailer for my boat but instead I decided to start addressing some of its issues it had dry rotted tires that wouldn't hold air the rims were rusted onto the hubs the rollers were all cracked and worn and of course the winch was bad and I ended up doing a series of upgrades and repairs to that made some YouTube videos about that as well to make the trailer better the trailer is better but really I ended up probably spending more than I should have and for a little bit more money I could have just bought a better used trailer however the old trailer that I have meets my needs because I'm about a block from the water so I just have to roll it down to the marina a few times a year the next repair is actually a legitimate repair of something that broke that I needed to fix and that was the bilge pump I got a call from somebody saying that there was a noise coming from my boat down in the marina and I went down to take a look and found that the float on my bilge pump was stuck and so the bilge pump was just constantly running so I had to buy a new float for that and wired that in there which which was wasn't expensive but that was an actual repair because had I left it running it would have burned up the bilge pump and probably run my batteries out the final repair I did in the first year of ownership was to repair the shifter because I was new to boating I didn't realize how bad my shifter was I just knew I had a heck of a time shifting it from forward to reverse and I was trying to pull it in and out of the marina it was very very difficult to shift and I took a friend of mine out on my boat who has a boat himself and knew a lot about boats and he said your shifter isn't working right it's it's it's in bad shape so I took that apart cleaned that up and lubricated the the shift cables and found something that was binding inside of the assembly made a video about that too so that was one of the other repairs that that actually cost me nothing except for the part that I broke whenever I was replacing one of the cables upgrades the original owner of the boat used it for fishing so because this was an old boat he took out all the seats and kept it open so that he could fish from the boat and he didn't worry about sitting down whenever he went out to go fishing so our first priority because we just bought the boat for riding around and was to install some seats so I ended up buying these back to back seats and putting them in there so that way I could seat for people and we had nice new seats in the boat that was a pretty big expense that was $300 to to order those seats and I installed them I didn't make a video about that I wish I had but I just went ahead and had put them in before I started making a lot of videos about my boat the next expense an upgrade was a bimini top and I don't like having the Sun beat on me and out in the water can be pretty sunny so bimini top keeps the Sun off of me while we're out there boating I think they look a little awkward on a boat but they're just fantastic and we actually got this one online I shopped around and it was pretty cheap there's ones you can really spend a lot on and I put that on there myself too and I didn't make a video about that either but there it was pretty straightforward to put it on it's a little bit of a puzzle but but uh but it wasn't pretty well and then another one which was sort of a preventive maintenance instead of an upgrade was I bought new plastic fuel tank and I bought a new fuel line just because every few years you should replace these things and those are a common area where things can fail you can get water leaking into the fuel tank or the fuel line can actually fail going to the motor and because it's it's out there in the Sun all the time those are good things to replace periodically so it was one of my upgrades which I think what was more of a bit of maintenance keep in mind one of the things reason we bought a cheap boat was to learn and we did learn a lot about stuff and none of the things were prohibitively expensive none of them left us stranded and if you're willing to look some stuff up on the internet and ask around and try some things at yourself and have some tools there's a lot of these things that you can do yourself as long as your engine holds up and our engines been doing just fine so to summarize we only took the boat out about 20-25 times in our first year of ownership we had a total of six repairs and three upgrades in total it was under a thousand dollars for all of the upgrades all of the repairs and the safety gear so that's really not too bad I think considering you know other types of hobbies as you're just getting into something I'm really hoping this year goes a lot better and that we can spend more time enjoying our boat and less time doing repairs and upgrades to the boat there's only a few other things that I'd like to change and the time being and I actually just recently took off the the kicker motor mount on the back and I'm going to be filling those holes in but I'm realistic this boat is over 40 years old and the engine is over 30 years old so there are things that are going to go wrong and maybe in the future we're getting ourselves a bigger boat because now we're getting an idea about what we'd like to have for our future boat and if you're thinking about getting a boat for the first time I did put together a video that I'll off link to here about buying your first boat things that you should consider besides just cost and size there's a lot of things to think about whenever you go to buy your first boat so I put a video together about that thank you for watching I hope this was informative if so please be sure to like and comment below

Channel: Wayne The Boat Guy

Views: 60,372

Keywords: buying an old boat, should you buy an old boat, buying an older boat, buying used boat, buying a cheap boat, is it worth it to buy an old boat, cheap old boat, should i buy an old boat, hidden costs when purchasing older boat, old boat costs, boat ownership basics, boat ownership for beginners, low cost boat, are old boats worth buying, old boats vs new boats, old boats, are boats worth it, buying a boat, used boat, cheap boats, bargain boats, renken boat

Id: _9fCoEceM4k

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020