What trailer do I need?

[Kentfielddude]

I have a 11ft hydroplane and was wondering what length trailer I need. Looking for a used one. Will a jet ski trailer work?

[Hunt Leavitt]

A 10' jet ski trailer will work just fine, but be sure to put the motor in the back of the car/truck and not on the transom while towing it. Put the motor on and hook it up when you get to the water. Good luck.

[Kentfielddude]

10ft from the back to the tongue or to the roller?

[Hunt Leavitt]

As long as you don't have a motor on the boat on the trailer then you could position the boat with as much as 1' extending beyond the end of the bunks. So measure from the bow stop on the winch stand to the end of the bunks and that should be between 10' and 11'.

[krazy karl]

Interesting boat, do you know what it is? Not a hydroplane by the way. They were called utilities in the day, now called runabouts. The rounded bottoms went away a long time ago, at least in racing.

[Kentfielddude]

It's a class b utility.

[Fastjack]

looks like a Hal Kelly -- Blue Streak --

[dwhitford]

While I see elsewhere on this thread that you should not attach your engine and then trail the boat, I suspect that it's because none of us have yet seen any ''knee-bracing" of your transom. While I don't know the origin of the term ''knee bracing'', I suspect it's from the knee-bent config of the actual bracing pieces. What you need to add to strengthen your boat is a pair 1/4'' pieces of' plywood from the inboard edges of the engine-mounting board of your transom to longitudinal stringers of your boat bottom. These plywood knee-braces should extend about 18'' fore and aft against the inside of the bottom plywood and are glued to the sides of the bottom stringers.

With a correct initial design of your runabout, the engine-board edges and the corresponding bottom stringers would line up OK to make this construction quite easy. If not, you can put it right with wooden shims on either the bottom stingers or the sides of the engine-mounting board, as necessary.

I surely disrecommend your putting a robust 20- or 22-cubic-inch vintage Merc (Mark 20, 25, 28, 200, and so on) on your runabout without first bracing the transom with knee bracing. Any of those engines would make short work of wrecking your un-braced boat quite quickly, even not on a race course.

Look at the Hal Kelley plans for runabouts on the Boat Sport website. The Foo-ling drawings on that site illustrate the necessary transom bracing quite clearly.

After you install the bracing, I see no reason why you can't trailer your boat with the engine installed. That'll save you a lot of mistake-prone, hurry-up time at the regatta and ensure you the precise and unhurried workshop time to get your setup complete & correct. Just make sure to extend the padded or carpeted boat-bearing bunks far enough aft to fully support the boat and its engine.

Then check trailer balance with the boat load. You need at least 90 pounds of down force on the hitch-to-ball interface to prevent unwanted trailer uncouplings from bumps in the road. From personal experience I cannot over-emphasize how important this is!

[krazy karl]

I googled HK Blue Streak but nothing came up. Yes it is a B Utility but was curious as to who's design. It looks like a Kelley design but not his usual method of stringer design and I didn't think he ever used a rounded bottom.  

[dwhitford]

I think Bob Rusnak had it right in an earlier post, in which he identified it as a design from Popular Mechanics, Mechanics Illustrated, or some other such ''pop'' magazine, not devoted to serious Stock Outboard racing. The design is quite different from ''serious'' Hal Kelly designs from the same era. Karl, you are correct that the framing and overall design is entirely different from anything Hal Kelly ever did for runabouts.

[ZUL8TR]

looks like a Hal Kelly -- Blue Streak --

I remember Blue Streak, was a William Jackson design

http://svensons.com/boat/?f=Runabout...ue_Streak1.jpg

[M Miner]

I can't tell you anything about your wood boat. But it looks like your lab is in a mid 90s MasterCraft?

[Kentfielddude]

[dwhitford]

Yep, that's the drawing you need. See where the left of the drawing points out the ''1/4'' plywood knees''.

[Kentfielddude]

Ok. Thanks for the info.

[Kentfielddude]

What type of wood should I use ?

[bill hoctor]

wood for a fire pit would be good !

[rumleyfips]

Dave :
Boat knees have been around for a long time. Sailing ships had them attached to the keel to carry the planking. The knees were cut from tree roots and the but of the trunk naturally grew in the right angle. Some woodcutter close to shipyards specialized in supplying them.