Restoring a Boston Whaler is a fairly straight forward project. You will strip the boat, check for soft spots, repair, fiberglass, sand, prime and paint. Then you would either replace or refinish all the wood and reassemble the boat. If the boat came with a motor you would clean, rebuild or repair it and then repaint it if necessary. On my project, I scrapped the motor and bought a brand new tiller steer 20 horsepower Tohatsu. In this series of articles I am going to cover all the steps we took. Also, if you are looking for a boat to restore you can go to our section on how to find a used Boston Whaler by clicking here.
A 1968 – 13 foot Boston Whaler is used for this series of articles. The same steps would apply to the 15 and 17 foot boats as well as the larger ones. For larger boats you will need some help moving the boat around. Also flipping a 17 foot or larger boat would require several people.