Well, I have had a nice break from working on the Tahoe.
The Tahoe is still doing great, over the summer it spent lots of time towing a 22ft StarCraft islander.
That Starcraft Islander (Model 221v) is a 1994 model, it was also a bit of a project spring of 24, and into early summer.
Finished mid-July.
I bought it with a cracked engine block, and needing some flooring work.
The boat itself is aluminum, and the "V" prefix in the model specifies it has the heavy-duty hull.
Reinforced big time and meant for "big water".
For the engine replacement, I ended up buying a built engine, and then doing a full tear down of that engine.
I found it was dirty as fk, lazy builder.
Lots of little issues found with it, including a freeze plug that they left inside of the block, I had to pull the freeze plug, and then remove the old one from within the block.
Turning the assy I found grit, that lead to the full tear down, plus how dirty everything was made me want to verify everything.
The grit sound was caused by one messed up thrust bearing, I guess they used a generic and then clearanced the bearing using a brick?!
Yeah, so it got full bearings, and I ended up replacing the balance shaft bearings.
Dirty as fk, plus I wanted to clean behind them.
To do the swap, I didn't have anything tall enough to pull the engine, so I opted to make something using UniStrut.
This is tied to the studs in the wall, and the ceiling, and then an extra support towards the middle for good luck.
They also did the hot wash tank, but didn't follow up with brushes and fine cleaning.
The flooring is just plywood, and the hull is 100% aluminum, including the "Stringers".
The flooring while it's Marine ply, was originally "Sealed" with vinyl flooring.
The PO decided he wanted carpet and cut the vinyl out and had it carpeted.
That resulted with the carpet holding water against that marine ply.
The first thing I did was to rip that carpet out, and put the original vinyl back in.
Somewhere I have a good before picture, but I wasn't about taking pictures of how nasty it looked with the "Bathroom carpet" look.
This is a picture during, I had tp pull up the benches, and then flowed epoxy into fhe plywood in order to attempt to "bring it back".
I really should have just pulled all of the plywood up, however I was on a time crunch.
End of july the family had a big outing where they wanted the boat up at the lake.
It took so much epoxy and sanding to really bring the floors back to something I was willing to cover with $600 of vinyl flooring, It might have been faster and cheaper to start fresh.
I did end up having to replace the center floor section.
The way the boat works, the side flooring has a complex box/cross supports that go from the bottom of the hull up to the floors.
Lots of support there.
The middle flooring section is where the 53 gallon tank sits.
Not much support, it's also a thicker piece of plywood at 3/4in.
there was no bringing back that middle section where I would ever be happy with it.
So a new piece was made and encapsulated in marine epoxy.
And then painted white using an epoxy paint for extra protection.
I don't have a good picture of that sitting in my amazon account.
The Jeep project also stands as "done"
Final thing was a front and rear axle re gear to 5.13 and some Eaton true trac diffs installed in both axles.
I was pushing for air lockers, but the guy doing the work talked me out of air lockers.
He does a bit of rock crawling and sports a Jeep JKU like mine but sports a 6.2ls (Gen 4) and 6l80 swap.
Told me to run them, and when I get to the point where I want to upgrade, he told me to also replace the front axle.
As it sits now, with a fresh set of BFG AT KO2's and wearing the OEM soft top.
