Re: Tall Boat into a Low Garage
Well, I'm late to the thread, but here's my solution to the same problem when I had to get my 210 Sea ray into my garage.
First, I should note that I had fixed up the trailer for it quite a bit, including putting drop axles on it that lowered it by 4 inches. This caused a lot of other problems, but when I had to put it in the garage it helped.
On that trailer, it sat about 9 1/2 feet above the ground at the top of the windshield. I had no hard top, nor anything else projecting that high. The garage was hand-built by a previous owner, and was oddly constructed, being a large two car garage (about 28ft x 23 feet) with a 7 foot high door, and homemade trusses about 7 feet 1 inch off the floor. But it was a concrete floor, was out of the weather, and I had a gas line that ran to it, so I could work in the coldest weather (at great cost for gas as it turned out).
So what I did was I removed the windshield. I just removed the trim, stored it, removed the SS screws, put 'em in a plastic jar, and muscled the extremely heavy windshield off by myself (don't try this yourself). The windshield went in my attached garage, the boat in the detached.
Then it would just.... barely....fit, provided I drove it straight in and gave the suspension time to adjust to the bump at the garage front. Of course, I forgot to remove the "arm" on the garage door opener, which cost me some vinyl that I had been planning to remove anyway.
I also neglected to watch my horns (2 of 'em) closely enough, so they were badly damaged enough to need removal.
Once inside I used some car stands and a hydraulic jack to take the boat off the trailer. This saved me a few inches to work in, cut down wear on the trailer, and gave me a more stable, better supported hull to work on.
In the end I got it in and redid the deck and stringers Jan-April. I'd say it was worth it, although I don't want to do that again unless there's a real need.
I also decided that this boat was wrong for me... I wanted some features of a bigger boat, but in a boat small enough for me to handle solo. This is neither, so I'm going to build a smaller boat this winter, and buy a bigger one that I'll keep in a slip.
Oh, and I'm going to store the current one in covered storage for the winter, so I preserve all the work I did without having to muscle the windshield around.
Erik
