JEM Watercraft

those tails sticking out the back acted like trim tabs to keep nose slap down and help with the weight of an oversized engine. I'm running with trim tabs on the back for that reason. I've been to 43mph with a 35hp... I'm hoping for 55+ before i'm finished. Its only 11' long. It should give a lil rush.

When I was in college, my roommate and I found a homemade plywood boat that someone had thrown out. It was just a 4 by 8 sheet of 3/4 plywood with two wedge shaped compartments on each side and a transom. The compartments weren't waterproof so we filled them up with pieces of foam that we got from a cemetery trash pile (foam bibles and crosses and rings for wreaths). Looked about like this:

Steve had a 6hp Johnson that we ran on it. When you stopped, the boat and the side compartments would fill up with water, but they would drain out when under way. Every now and then, if you hit a wave it would dig in and try to turn into a submarine. It wouldn't hardly turn while on plane even after we added a 2x2 for a keel on the bottom, but we had a lot of fun with it until Steve turned it over one day and tore one of the side compartments off. We dumped it back out in the woods like we had found it.
Wimperdinks table has always reminded me of that boat.

Dad had a souped up Sea King. Started out as an 8 1/2 horse. Some guy ordered it, but by the time it came back the War had started, and the store sold it cheap. I don't know how fast it went, but nothing on Houghton Lake could catch it, including all the big inboards that tried.

By the way WD, that is a pretty boat that you have there.

Jimmy

Thanks jimmy.

btw did that boat look anything like this? (my first build)

Did you run an Castor Oil mix in it and race it? Man I loved the smell when they went flying by.Those races were fun to watch.
A lot of them ( back then in the dark ages ) were Merc's , 9.9's or close to it and with some modifications were almost double the horsepower. A real hurricane on the water.

Chuck.

It looked something like that, but was as I showed with just a flat sheet of plywood and the side wedges and transom. On plane, the front of the plywood ran about 2 or 3 inches above the water. If you hit a wave higher than that it would usually slice through the wave and throw water back over the boat. We ran it laying back on a wedge shaped pillow to be under the water coming back with the gas tank between our legs. Things got interesting when it dug into a wave and came to a sudden stop and we kept sliding forward into the gas tank while trying to get the throttle shut down. Before we added the keel, you could turn the motor and the boat would pretty much just keep going straight, but sideways. It was fun fish-tailing down the lake going from one side to the other. The keel didn't help it out all that much. We ran it mostly in a fairly small lake that we usually had to ourselves.