 Oh yeah, that's gonna be heavy. This is going to be a crazy episode y'all. Welcome back to the channel. Today we are gonna be working on my John Boat making massive upgrades for under $500. Currently it's getting an oil change right now and in disarray and while we were changing the hubs, while we were changing the oil, I thought we would go ahead and work on some other things and try to make this a fun little budget build. So the Christmas collector, she gets me from A to B but she does have a serious problem right now with the motor being mounted. It's way too low in the water and we need to bring that motor up. So one of the biggest things that we could do is add a jack plate on. Now she definitely ain't the prettiest thing going down the road and she's got some character but we are going to make a big upgrade on the aesthetics by putting in some new foam decking, taking out the nasty carpet that is bad on the equipment, riding on it, it slides around. It's rough on your knees. It's gotten to where it's really just nasty, rough, corroded, ripping, falling out. So we're going to replace that with some nice decking and really make this thing pop. Now one of the nice things about this boat is I did repower it in 2019 with a new Mercury four stroke EFI 25 horsepower. So the first thing we got to do is take this big motor off to get started. All right, we're going to have to enlist the help of my Catfish Queen OSG, Ocean Spoon Girl for all you new subscribers out there. Lake Four Guy Ocean Spoon Girl, opposite the tracks. We're married. We can get it off. Once we get it off, we got to get it. But I will pivot into... You can't forget these things when we're in the process. Sorry, I saw it happening. All right, round two. I'm going to earn that cold beer. Use those toes and those knees. Ender shot. Do it. Gas line is off. How many more lines are there? This way? Yep. Got it, girl. My Catfish Queen. Don't just move your hands out of the way. Yep, my hands are up. I'm in. You're not. I'm in. Just hold the back. I'm going to lift the front. Okay. You got the back? I got it. Okay. There she goes. She's not going to hold. No, no, I'm not so sure. Babe, it's not going to hold. All right. She's in there now. I'm sure she's going to hold. She's in there. She's going to hold. That's dairy rigged. I'm starting to think this might be above the weight limit for the jack plate I got. The only time that me and OSG have ever like dropped something. Got into super big feuds. It's moving, heavy things. Usually it's my furniture. Yeah, it's usually furniture. That actually went pretty well. I think we did all right. Next up, we got to take out that old nasty carpet. And not just that, but also the double-sided Velcro that it was attached to with. And now the crispy collector is looking extra crispy. Tons of dirt, gunk, adhesive, boogers. And we're just going to clean all of that up and use some adhesive removing liquids to really clean this up, give it a nice surface to attach our foam decking to. Look at that. Eat me, I'm dirty. Look at all those teeth marks on there. That was a good day. Could be completely wrong, but cleaning all the goo off of the boat, the leftover stickies from all the Velcro, which wasn't even Marine Velcro, by the way. That was probably the worst of it. Taking that goof off, which by the way also takes the paint off. Keep that in mind if you guys are going to try this. Might be better just to use some isopropyl alcohol or something like that. But I feel good enough about it now that the surface is kind of prepped so that when the sea deck comes in, we'll be able to install it and it will stick. Next problem we got is we still have four holes in the boat. Now two of them are above the water line and I'm not that concerned with them, but the two lower ones are definitely going to be important to plug up nicely. And the best way I know how to do that is to just put the same sized bolts that were in there before in there with some washers and some silicone and seal them up. This boat did not leak at all beforehand, but I've just discovered where it's probably going to start leaking soon. So this problem has been growing and literally the last time we took this boat out, it really started separating on the weld right here. This has sort of always been here. I'm going to probably take that to a shop and have that re-welded. That's kind of out of my expertise, which isn't very much at all. So while we're waiting for that foam decking to come in, let's get some bolts, some silicone, plug up these holes. The hardware that came with the Merck was metric. So now what I'm going to do is take a half inch drill bit to match the half inch bolts that we have. We're going to just clean that out a little bit where we can get them through, put some silicone in there around some washers, tighten it up and hopefully that's going to hold. My main concern is these two bottom ones. So let's get started. We got the holes walled out, but the angle with the angle is a small gap. I don't see any wood in between there. So just the angle that I went through made a small little gap. Hopefully that will be okay. We'll just stuff it with silicone and hope it gets to where we need to be. And this is our decking right here. And our jack plate came in a day early. So we're going to install that after we get our decking installed and this is going to really make this boat pop. So I ordered three sleeves of the decking. They reach about 50 bucks a piece. So probably a little more expensive than redoing the carpet, but this is going to be a waterproof, grippy, just great solution. That's not abrasive on your feet and your gear. And it's not going to slide around. Hopefully, hopefully it's going to stick. After all the work that we've put in, washing it, we've also added some isopropyl alcohol to kind of lift some of the dirt, lift some of the things out there, any kind of residues that might be left. You know, greasy plastics, all that kind of stuff that will prevent our sticky stuff from sticking. So let's break these out and check it out. Look at that. Got a little classic camo on there. Stuff looks good. It's not that thick. So you can definitely get thicker, but you know, thicker you get, more expensive. Measured it out, first square inch. So we should have enough. So we got our first couple pieces cut out. So let's get started. I'm just going to put these two down to kind of get, just get things going, see how it feels, looks, and then we'll cut out the rest and have a nice full deck. This is going to look awesome. That is really nice, y'all. Huge, huge upgrade so far. So we'll finish this deck up. And that'll be a huge move to make this thing just look a lot nicer. Okay, sun's starting to go down on us, but just doing the math here, we do have enough to cover the entire boat. We're just going to have to make some special cuts. So the little scrap pieces, adding up those little scrap pieces, it's not going to be perfect. So I'm going to have to add a couple more pieces, splice them in there with that long piece. The whole center is covered. Main part of the back deck, we got these two little side parts and then this middle that we'll be able to cover completely. So we're just going to be scrapping it together. So I'm going to finish this up and I will see you guys at sunrise for the big project I'm excited about and that's installing the jack plate. That's going to improve performance. It's going to put our prop where it needs to be. This thing has been running way too low. So it's going to make a huge difference and it's going to look cool. It's like having a lift on a truck. It's going to look sweet. So I will see you guys at sunrise and we'll keep on working. Oh, it's nice to come out here and look at this boat and just see a new face to it on the inside. The foam feels amazing. It's a great work surface just to, you know, things don't move around. They're not shifting like that carpet was. It looks great. And it's also going to reduce some of that vibration as well so that all those things are great upgrades for the John boat. Now let's move on to the jack plate. So this is going to be our jack plate guys. This is the TH Marine mini jacker and I was able to get this for $180. So that brings us under that $500 still was 150 for the foam decking, 180 for this. So budget's looking pretty good right now. The reason I went with this jack plate is because of the cost and I think it's going to do what I need it to. We are going to be pushing this thing to the absolute limit as far as getting the most out of it for a price of a jack plate. The reason I wanted to get this was to raise it up enough to get my long shaft motor around where my cavitation plate is flushed with the bottom of the boat. Get it close. It's probably still going to be under it but it's sitting way under it now. So we're going to improve that. The problem with this is it's really designed for smaller motors than what I have here. It's rated for up to 35 horsepower but the max weight says 150 pounds. We're at 170 pounds over here. So we're over that and we're still going to have to raise this up above the transom which gets even sketchier plus our mounting situation with the bolts, the way they line up with this motor. We're barely going to be able to get a bolt down here. We're a clamp on. It's, I mean, this thing is, it's a big clamp on. It's a really big clamp on for 170 plus pounds. It's big. So we're going to be absolutely pushing the limits with this. It's going to take some finagling to get it on here and get everything flush and get it up high enough to where we need it. And my point is this might be kind of dangerous. So if you're thinking this is going to solve the problems for a bigger motor, you need to go with a serious jack plate if you're getting over 170 pounds especially. So our next step guys is going to be figuring out the middle of this boat. And I've actually already done that. Just done that by taking a tape measure and going from side to side at the lowest point, going to the widest point, measuring the center and then drawing the line up that. We're pretty darn close I think. See how we did. Here's our new hole. Goes right through nice and easy. Looking good. Now that we've got our pilot holes essentially drilled, what I'm going to do is I'm going to raise this up. We're going to have to drill some new holes in this plate and then we'll raise it up two inches. So this will actually give us three inches of lift. So if we add that other two inches, we should get five, which will get us pretty darn close I think to where we need to be with the cavitation plate. My motor's so heavy that I can't really lift it up and just check it real quick. So we're just going to have to make an educated guess and run with that. The nice thing is if I do need to go up another inch, I can but I think I'm really going to be, it's really going to be sketchville if we have to do that. So we got our holes drilled and we got the plate sitting exactly where we want it. I've actually already put in the stainless steel bolt. So I've just put a couple of the, put a couple of nuts on there to hold things in position. No lock nuts, no washers yet. And I've clamped it and just done some measurements. It's sitting flush right where we want it and actually feel sturdier now that I haven't mounted here than I was anticipating. Plus, this took me quite a bit of effort to drill through this aluminum hole, the two sides. There's no board in the middle, but it's really strong aluminum. So I feel pretty good about that. I'm just going to move the mounting hole for the bottom all the way down instead of using the pre-drilled. That's an inch higher. So that way it will be a little bit wider and that'll give us some more stability. So we now have all four of our holes drilled. I ended up running into one snag and while I was drilling this bottom right hole, I hit one of the angle braces. Then I just had to kind of chew through it and I finally got to the other side. So I kind of damaged that brace. That's really holding this transom together, which is not good, but the other side was fine. So it was just kind of in a weird spot symmetrically. Now there's a wooden piece that's going to mount up through here. And we'll use that to clamp down the motor and also drill through if we can drill through at the bottom. And this is the wood that it came with. The reviews I saw on Amazon said that this was not treated. I guess since then they have updated that and TH Marine has decided to treat this wood. It's got some sort of oil on it or polyurethane, I don't really know. But what I'm going to do is actually for aesthetics, I'm going to take some, it's basically like Flex Seal. It's a Gorilla Glue's version. It's a black waterproof patch and spray and or patch and seal. And I'm just going to spray that. So that way when I'm looking back, aesthetically, all the colors kind of match and it'll be waterproof. So we'll spray this on here, let it dry. I don't have any three eighths bolts. So we're going to have to go get some. And then we should be able to pick the motor up. We'll have to call on LFD, not OSG this time, about killed us. So we'll get my dad here, we'll mount the motor and then we'll be able to make those little final adjustments, bolt it in and it's going to be good to go. It's the exciting part. Now we're going to apply some silicone to this jack plate, to the face of it and around these bolts. We'll tighten everything down and it'll be ready to mount a motor on. All right y'all there, she is mounted up. I feel pretty good about the drilling, the bolt size. It all came out pretty nicely. Nothing sticking out too crazy. Let's see how much height we got out of this thing. That's the most important part, right at five, right at five inches. Use half inch bolts, all stainless steel of course. The next thing we got to do is put this in here. But first we got to mount the motor and that is going to be a pain in the D. So I'm bringing in LFD. My dad, all American knows tackle. He's getting up there in age, but he's still got it. So we're going to deploy him to get this big old fat murk up here and see how everything lines up. We're going to have to put it back. Problem was, these are too wide, the holes he came with. You're going to have to reach really close. Never in my life have I tasted a better cold brusky than that. You should probably be drinking water. But I just, I have to drink a beer to celebrate the murk being mounted. And my gosh, has it, has it been jacked to the sky or what? As usual, you know, you get into a project and like 14 different things arise and you're like, oh man, I didn't think of that. So no, this happened, blah, blah, blah. So here's my report on what I think needs to go on. I think this motor is actually too big for this boat. It came with a 20, I got a 25. It's just like the mounting hardware going from 20 to 25 was just way different. Even though this is clamp on, it's way deeper. It's wider at the top here. I just ran into a lot of issues. So I was barely, barely able to get two bolts at the bottom of this thing. And I just don't feel comfortable running straight clamps on this boat. I just don't, especially with it being raised two inches off the transom. Actually it's even higher now. I'll show you here in a second. So we've got that bolted there, right there and then two inches above that. And then this is clamped on up top. And then I've got a bolt that is barely going through wood right there. A complete sketch fill. And then over here, we barely got another one. I just had, by the skin of my teeth, had wood to get a bolt through there. It's right at the bottom of the wood. I mean, just barely, like half of it sticking out. Half the bolt sticking out of the wood. So we got that washer in there and the lock nut. Super ugly, but had to do it. I had some old heart pine and I stuffed that in between the jack plate and the top of the mounting bracket for the motor. So I could get that one little screw, that one little bolt in right there, right at the bottom. So I was out of a room, so I had to lift it up a little bit to get it in there. But it's in. So we've got clamp on, I've put 20 pounds of force on there with my torque wrench. Down here, I don't know. It just, if I torque it too hard, it's gonna just bust the wood. So I don't feel the best about it, but our cavitation plate is like dead, even with the bottom of the boat now, maybe even a little bit higher than the boat. So performance wise, that's, I think that's about five and three quarter inches of lift that should put us, you know, into the shallow running boat category. We're barely hanging down there now. And honestly, from this angle, it doesn't look too bad. It actually looks good having the motor to lift it up like that, you know, with the whole vibe. The whole vibe right now is just screaming, give me some catfish, give me some ducks, maybe a whitetail from the shore. Who knows? Is it safe? Probably not. Did I recently get life insurance? Yes, so I'm not feeling terrible about it. We are going to test this thing out, of course. So you guys need to stay tuned for all that action. My whole goal was to get this boat just running, be viable, where I can take it out any time and be fine. I started with a broken wheel hub. It's now turned into a $500 performance upgrade, which by the way, we got one more thing. The final piece of this project just came in, just arrived on the front doorstep. And we're gonna put it on. This is a $12 add-on. And it is a monitor for the motor. So I can keep track of the hours and I can also see the RPMs. So just two really basic things, but for 12 bucks, it's gonna be really nice. It would have been even nicer if I had it beforehand to really know my hours. But from now on, I will. And every hundred hours, this motor is going to need some maintenance. With this little device here, it's just cheapo off Amazon. I think Mercury makes one of these, a Mercury branded product, but this is just a little kit for any kind of small engine monitoring. It comes with some 3M Velcro. Basically this is going to mount. We'll mount it probably right here. We'll wrap this around one of the wires, go into a spark plug and it will transmit information every time that's firing so we can understand the RPMs and the hours. Well, I am drenched in sweat, but the Krispy Kolektor, she's dripping too. My gosh, massive upgrades guys for under $500. So including that little digital tracker that we put on here, that added just 12 bucks with the hardware that added a little money, but we're still right around 450. So under $500, we put brand new decking in. It looks fantastic. The motor is jacked up. We actually ended up getting it almost to six inches. So I'm really interested to see how this rides. I even put a new hub on the opposite side so everything is balanced now and seems to be going pretty good. We'll see how far she gets down the road, but I'm really interested to see how the Merck performs in the water with the new Mini Jacker on the back. So if you guys want to see more videos like this, more upgrades on the Krispy, I've got a couple more ideas. Let me know in the comments down below, but I think we did a great job for under 500 bucks and man, honestly, if I wanted to resell this thing now, a lot of added value to it, but she means a lot to me and I'm ready to go set some jug lines, catch some catfish with this thing. So stay tuned for all that. We'll see how the Merck runs and see how the whiskers are biting. Thank you guys for tuning in to another outdoor video. I will see you guys on the next one.