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I finally got rid of the deteriorating rubber on my swim deck. As people would walk from the swim deck to the white vinyl sun pad, their feet would leave black rubber footprints from the rubber coming off on their feet. I replaced it with a pad from Sea Dek. Removing the old pad took a lot of acetone and even more elbow grease. Once it was clean I cut off the oxidization so that everything was shiny black. I'm thrilled with the results.

I solved a number of problems with this upgrade: A. Everyone gets on the boat with a dead cell phone battery and wants to use my phone to take pictures of their kids/spouse/etc. Then I have to send them the pictures. B. I have the only 12V plug at the helm and others want to charge their phones. C. My kids want to listen to their devices but I don't want to set up the bluetooth to connect to their devices. D. I have a nice volt meter for the engine battery on my dash but don't really know what voltage my house battery has unless I pull out the volt meter in my tool box. So I installed 2 items in my glove box. 1. USB Volt Meter (tied into constant 12V from my house battery so we could charge phones even when the engine is off) 2. AUX (3.5mm jack) input and connected it to my Clarion M606 Parts List: $17 - https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KQ9GRO2/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 $9 - https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B077F7978F/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 $8 - https://smile.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-3-5mm-2-Male-Adapter-Cable/dp/B01D5H8KO2/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1519831642&sr=1-3&keywords=rca+to+male+3.5 Added to my AUX1 Put it all together with a few careful holes in my glove box (at 11.3 volts it looks like it's time to charge the house battery): Now all 4 problems are solved. I keep a few different USB charging cables for different types of phones and we are off to the races. The phones/devices can charge safely in the glove box and spool tunes straight to the Clarion M606 head unit.

When my boat sits on the trailer, the raw water intake is covered by the starboard bunk. In order to run the engine on the trailer, I pulled the intake hose off the intake thru-hull and attached it to my Lowes special of adapters: However, since building this Fake-A-Lake, I saw a valve posted on the Mastercraft Teamtalk site and have added this valve just above my raw water intake. It's always ready to take a hose and I don't have to risk breaking my thru-hull. Buy at: https://www.supplyhouse.com/sh/control/product/~product_id=40615

My boat came with the three ballast pump motors attached to the transom. One was mounted with the pump head below the motor and the other two mounted with the pump heads above the motors. The problem with the head below the motor was that it was a pain to change the impeller. The problem with the pump head above the motor is that water inevitably drips into the motor and corrodes out the motor. The two motors that were below the pump heads were pretty severely corroded but surprisingly somewhat worked. My project was to build HDPE shelves for the motors to sit on to eliminate both problems. Here is a picture of the center pump mounted already on a shelf with the starboard pump still mounted in the factory position. Here's the lower bushing of one of the corroded motors. Building the shelves was not complicated but I did have to ensure there was room for the pumps to sit on the shelves using the original pump mounting holes in the transom. It was a little tight installing the shelves but it was well worth it. I did have to rotate the pump heads on a couple of the pumps to make sure water was still going in the right direction when I flipped the switches to fill/empty. The motor that had the pump head below it did not need a "reversal." They look nice all in line. Next time I need to change impellers it will be an EASY 10 minute job.