Okay so after I took the motor off the boat I noticed it was leaking brown water out the lower mount bolt holes..not good. I could take and squeeze the transom and water would come out of those holes, so that transom is toast. After contemplating putting more time and effort into this one I decided to just go and get the other Niagara I found on craigslist.
Last Sunday I made the trek up to Tampa and picked up the new member of the fleet. It doesn't have the serial and date plate so I'm not sure what year, it is, but it's no '72 like it stated in the ad. I'm thinking more early 60's, hard to tell though. It also had a rotted transom, but the PO (previous owner) had already hacked away about half of the old wood with his chainsaw, so rather than start from scratch on the '72 I'm just going to move the good stuff from the '72 to this new one. I found a local dealer for the Arjay 6011 transom core stuff in Sarasota so I'll be picking up a 5 gallon pail of that to pour into the transom cavity.
Here's how she looked after the tow home. This one had two things I really wanted for the '72, the glass and the factory steering wheel. The glass is actually in really good shape, not crazed and cracked like I was expecting, the steering wheel though is starting to crumble on the outside. Not sure how I'm going to restore it. I was actually thinking of trying to find a place that could scan and 3D print a new one for me.
Here you can see the small cracks forming, eventually I'll replace this with some new polycarbonate, but right now a good sanding and polishing will pring it back into good nic.
Here's the steering wheel I was lusting over, plenty of holes in the dash and no gauges. I'll probably just fabricate some aluminum panels to go over the holes in the middle of the dash.
The floors are a little soft also. with some stress cracks forming all over. I guess I should go ahead and pull the floor out and redo it from the duck pond back, i'll probably make a drain for the duck pond also