It's been a while since I posted anythig to the blog, I've got so much stuff to to write up on the Ghia, that I don't really know where to start, so I thought I'd indulge in a little diversion by blogging about something a little bit left field - A boat!!

As most of you will know VW didn't make boats, well not unless you include the schwimmwagen, and whilst I would love to own one of those, I'm not sure that they are any good for snapper fishing. So why blog about a boat? What's a boat have to do with VW's? Not much you might think, that is, unless it's a VW powered boat.

The boat in question is my latest acquisition.  I originally blogged out it in this post, and whilst it wasn't originally designed to be aircooled powered, with a power requirement of 18hp, the 40 horse stationary engine that I originally bought for the splitty will do the job nicely.

The boat is a steel hulled inboard powered fishing boat 20 foot long by just over 8 foot at it's widest (6 metres by 2.5 metres) this is about the largest that can be towed on the roads here in South Australia without meeting towing restrictions. The boat was built by my father-in-law, and whilst it's not finished most of the hard work has been done.

Unfotunately my father-in-law lost focus in building the boat and was distracted by the lure of a couple of Triumph motor cycles instead, so rather then see his hard work go to scrap, I offered to take it off of his hands. Today we moved the boat from his garage to mine.

Moving the boat posed a couple of issues. The boat is built on a structural steel frame that acts as a jig, this was welded on the top of a coupe of heavy duty steel trestles, which meant that the whole thing was a pretty substantial weight and not easily moved. After a bit of pondering, I decided to get a couple of trailer axles and bolt these to the underneath of the trestles. After welding in some extra bracing the boat was mobile.

We loaded the boat up onto a car trailer, which was a bit of a challenge, mostly as the trailer axles were too wide to fit. The front axles just about squeezed in between the side rails, but the rear axle was far too wide and just about managed to get onto the rear of the trailer. After strapping the whole thing down, we set off. It's probably a good job that the front axles were too wide as the wheels wedged in between the side rails which stopped the boat from rolling back and forwards. Whilst great fo tthe journey, it was not so good when we tried to get the boat off at the other end. Initially we tried to pull the boat off of the trailer using a chain block, but these do not work too well horizontally, the chain kept getting jammed. Eventually we used a combonation of soapy water and a big lever bar to pry the wheels free.

With the boat unloaded the final thing was to get it into the garage, unfortunately with the additional height of the wheels, the boat is too high to fit, so for the time being it can stay outside.

The next step is to sort out the prop tube and tiller tube before welding the skin onto the hull. The hull is 3mm steel plate and is welded directly to the frame. Once the hull skin is fitted, the boat can then be turned over and the deck and cabin added.