Road Trip to Hot Rod Boat Heaven!

uh good morning we are into day two of the trip day one was actually uneventful i'm gonna koa campground there's my cabin that is uh cabin number three here uh cabin number three if you're not a smoker you don't wanna stay in it kind of stinks but it did give me a place to stay last night for 96 bucks that allowed me to make sure the boat didn't get stolen or the jet skis which is nice give the cover a once-over make sure everything's strapped down good and then i will go find a home depot so i can get a cable lock to go either in the wheels of the trailer or between the frame rail the trailer and the truck frame because tonight i'm gonna end up in pecos texas and i couldn't find a campground with a cabin that anyone would rent me to stay in so i'm gonna chance it and stay in a hotel of loosened up drove 600 miles yesterday which was pretty good because i got a really late start i didn't end up hitting the road until about 1 pm so that worked out good i'm back on schedule because i have to meet my family in parker arizona on thursday and today is tuesday so we got about another let's see oh i got another 1400 miles something like that which will be fine we made it all my stuff smells like smoke so towels linens everything's in the bed of the truck trying to air it out while i drive today and uh yeah right about now you're going where's the enclosed trailer where's the tower home uh total home is gone i used it twice last year and quickly discovered there's not a single comfortable bed in that thing which was the whole point was to be able to stay in it and stay places where i didn't talk about my stuff kill stone so got rid of the toddler home i still have a gooseneck trailer i just don't have anything to tow it with so i had a cover mid for the boat and i'm just going to be as careful as i can on this trip and it'll all work out i will be getting the roadkill ramp truck back here pretty soon back into service and once i have that back into service then we can figure out a trailer situation to haul things like this you know behind the ramp truck or i don't know something we'll figure it out but for now the old stock 21 tundra which is not really old it will do the job let's go thank you home depot i got locks i got cables got two different length cables two different size cables and uh this should be good this should work now all i need is a lug nut adapter so if i get a blowout i can get the wheels off the trailer so the last potential disaster at least that the one that i'm aware of is that all the lug nuts on those golf cart wheels have a spine drive kind of like a tuner style lug nut because the wheels are so small you can't fit a regular lug nut in them you know like like a three-quarter inch or a 13-16 pattern on it and i don't know where it went but i lost it so although i have spare wheels on the front of this thing i can't get them off if i have a blowout so i need to go find a tuner style adapter to fit these lug nuts i did stop my wheel shop on my way out of town when i was in a hurry and i had them checked so they are tight which is good but also not so good because i won't be able to get them off either [Music] but at least now we can stay at a hotel tonight because we have locks and that's the best you can do there we go we got a cable going through the trailer hitch through the frame and locked in the middle and then tonight i'll put one through the wheels of the trailer and park at a hotel get some good sleep without smoke hopefully there were these poles in the boat cover you can see these rings right here and these poles stuck up in there but as the cover loosened up and you know kind of got fitted to the boat you know as it went down the road the poles popped out so i'm going to extend them up higher because they're adjustable tighten the cover back down and then we should be pretty good after that cover's working good like you should have seen this bottom of this boat when i towed it back from california georgia the bottom of the boat was hammered and the top side would have looked like did if uh we didn't have it shrink wrapped for that trip and it definitely would have looked like that if we didn't have this cover on it for this trip let's find our poles yep there's our poles lying down there in the bottom of the boat so we'll stand those up we'll extend them and then we'll be good i don't know if you guys can hear me or not for all the wind but it is howling here in texas left shreveport this morning and i've driven i don't know probably about 250 miles i got another 280 to go uh i'm just outside of big spring texas and everything's going pretty good i don't want jinx myself but looks like at least one of the poles are still standing in the cover trucks telling good trailers working fine jet skis haven't fallen out yet which is nice looks like we lost the front pole but the back hole is still in that's where the front pole would have been the back one's still in so that's good news i'm gonna stretch my legs here and then get back on the road [Music] oh windy and pecos all right boat's still here yay skis are still here truck's still here hey goes roadhouse is still here uh let's see you did about 600 miles last night from shreveport louisiana to texas ended up driving via gps to the wrong part of town um i went 50 miles out of my way to what should have been my hotel but uh being a uh a parking lot where a hotel was being built not an actual hotel which was weird and uh double check the gps sure enough i typed in home two suites and it took me to the site of a future home two suites i had booked online a room had a different opportunity [Music] which isn't bad i liked it it was clean and more importantly stuff didn't get ripped off which is good so today i will drive from peglis texas all the way to tucson arizona maybe casa grande we'll see which leaves me an easy 200 to 280 mile drive on thursday into parker arizona where i will meet my family and start i'm on vacation let's be relying but uh we'll start the boating part of our vacation [Music] make sure everything is tight [Music] still got one pole i'm gonna roll with that i'm just gonna accept the fact that two pulls isn't gonna happen on this deal check all the straps make sure we're good and then i already have fuel so we'll just get going [Music] new mexico is beautiful i mean for a desert it is i do like driving through here that is a long-ass train [Music] quick break at a rest stop oh man i'm about 270 miles away from my buddy matt ringer's place in casa grande arizona you guys might remember him and his friend darren were the guys that sold us the watson and the draguar and uh they've bailed us out a bunch of times during roadkill shoots and uh i'm gonna go hang out with them this evening i'll get some dinner and then i have a short 200-ish mile drive to parker arizona where i'll be meeting my lovely wife and kids and having a good ass time boating on the colorado river just made it out the peli trailers here in casa grande arizona about to do a little maintenance little upgrades on the trailer so far working perfect 2 000 miles one direction there's matt i'm matt uh let's see so i think total we've got about 3 900 miles on the golf cart tires and they're wearing fine this is what the bottom that they don't know looks like [Music] it's not bad actually the condom is protecting the jet drive so hopefully no rocks gotten that deal [Music] yep those are the graphics running under the boat pretty sweet thank you eliminator boats we had this front crossmember here with these two pads and the sponsons were resting on that and uh it works fine but i'm worried that over time it's going to rub the gel coat off the sponsons so we're replacing that cross member which sat on top of the frame with another one that will connect from here back to that cross member and then it will have another section that goes up to a roller and the keel of the boat will sit on the roller and that'll support the nose of the boat instead of supporting it right here but you can kind of see where the the gel coat's getting a little hammered there so we're going to do that and then uh just service the hubs and stuff and torque the wheels one more time and then we'll be out of here this is our new center cross member going to get brackets here that'll bolt it to the middle cross member and then a u-bolt front clamps it to the frame and then somewhere in the middle there is where our keel roller slash d-pad whatever we end up putting in there it's going to support the bow of the boat and hopefully keep it from bouncing up and down when it goes down the road but more importantly we won't have that cross member with the carpeted pads on the side of the sponsons anymore to rub the gel coat because wifey doesn't want that always remember i'm doing this for you baby you [Music] four days 2 200 miles i don't want to drive anything i don't want to drive a boat right now but i made it thanks to everybody that helped get wifey's whip together she loves it i do too now let's go on vacation [Music] [Music] uh [Music] rainbows oh [Music] [Music] i'm sensing a pattern here it's the uh last day of our vacation which is right about the time everything falls apart uh let's recap had a lot of fun wifey loves the boat she drove it a bunch and yesterday we went on a 36 mile drive from uh parker all the way down to lost lake and uh alternator belt flew off and ejected he left decided didn't want to be there and um i thought all right we got about 10 miles to go maybe we'll make it right and the speed wires switch panel has this handy dandy little volt meter built into it so i was looking at that and uh we got down to about 11.8 volts and at the exact moment the motor turned off was also the same moment i developed a fuel leak over here and so uh it was actually really good timing i wasn't bummed about it all of a sudden we're driving along and i'm like why am i wet and i look down on my arm and i'm like why is the fuel tank spraying at me and i thought to myself this isn't good the side of the boat's filling up with gas i got people in here the exhaust is really hot because it's turbocharged and i thought okay i'm gonna turn it off and get to shore and you know the current of the river's flowing like six miles an hour so that's kind of dicey and uh as soon as i decided to head for sure the motor quit and uh luckily my friend randy towed us four miles upriver and um you know we made it back to the house no big deal i'll get a new belt um it's probably gonna happen again because the alternator is not quite lined up with the crankshaft it's sitting ahead of it like an eighth of an inch and uh i don't really have a good way to move it back yet because there's some things that are in the way so we'll just buy a pair of belts and you know cruise today last day of our trip uh let's see had some issues with the trailer um the fenders got taco'd uh you can see this one right here they got caught on a boat ramp and just ripped right off the trailer so right now what i'm doing is cobbling together some temporary steel shelving brackets that i got from the local hardware store with some hardware and some wood i found laying around here at the house and we'll get these bolted back on as best we can and we'll probably stop by cocopelli trailers on the way back home um to get a more permanent solution because there's only going to be one bolt at each end of each bracket which means they're going to wobble a little bit and you don't want to drive you know 2 200 miles home like that so that's where we're at fix these this morning get a new belt one more day of boating with the fam and then it's back to georgia to reality [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so okay wifey's a boat see everybody i told you it was hers i drove it he drove it like a boss it's not really hers it's totally hers it's not my boat well then i get game over i'm gonna go home and work on game over now and blast with me that this is hers that's her boat love you baby boating part of the vacation is over with had lots of fun broke a few things nothing major you know we lost lost an alternator belt on the boat which was no big deal fuel leak water leak no big deal um managed to mangle the fenders of the trailer which brought me back to kokopelli trailers here in casa grande arizona on my way home so we could fix the fenders on the trailer because i have some pretty janky temporary mounts in there but while we were here we're like well let's re-engineer the front of the trailer to make it a little more user-friendly we're gonna adjust the bow stop uh we're gonna move the winch so the winch is easier to access we're just gonna make this better and uh matt's kind enough to let me back in here today and we've got our winch relocated just need some gussets and uh we got our roller under the bow which is gonna stop the bow of the boat from bouncing up and down it's going good and when all that's done i will head back to georgia and as soon as i get home the very next day we go film roadkill which i'm really looking forward [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] okay here we go winch relocated valve stop lowered roller moved so that uh everything functions like it should and uh more importantly put new fender braces on this thing so that we no longer have the hardware store oh brackets holding everything together and while we're at it we moved the steps out so that they're easier to get it out of the boat so much much better and you can hardly tell the fender's kinked over there a little a little more hammer work on that it'll be good and so i'm out of here back to georgia [Music] 4 400 miles later back home in georgia [Music] stoked was a hell of a vacation trailer worked good boat cover worked good and for those that are wondering yes the golf cart tires are just fine no blowouts no problems no abnormal wear and yeah through texas when the speed limit was 80 i was doing 80. um [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Finnegan's Garage

Views: 366,005

Keywords: ROADKILL, jet boat, drag boat, ls, lsx, ls1, ls2, ls3, ls swap, ls swapped, cletus mcfarland, socal, river, colorado river, road trip, camping, rooster tail, twin turbo, twin turbos, mirror image, nelson racing engines, billet, eliminator daytona, mike finnegan

Id: N4bpedhPJ84

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 10 2022