Hello all I finally got my checkmate!!! I am from Rochester NY and I have been on the site for the past few years looking up and reserching all sorts of info on checkmate. Three years ago I decided that I wanted to buy a bigger "Family" boat with a cabin. I had my 4 choices a 283 mate, 288 sunsation, 29 scarab and 28 pantera looking for one with a single BBC. I looked at a bunch but really kept cocming back to the checkmates. I thought I had found my perfect boat three summers ago in kentucky it was a 92 28ft Enforcer with a 502 for $16,000. I took work off the next day got in the truck with cash in hand ready for the 8 hr drive there only to get a phone call saying it just sold.
The next three years were painful as I had to find a boat close to the enforcer at a price range under 25K. And being the cheap bastard that I am, it had to be a really good deal too
. So i found my 283 with a HP500 in cleveland on craigslist. I worked the owner over for a while and we finally agreed on a fair price 18K. All he needed was a release of the lein from the bank, oh yeah and he was behind payments and upside down on the boat, So for another 10 months went back and forth with Key Bank trying to buy the boat on a short sale. Making a long story longer the bank ended up getting repossesed and dissappeared. It popped up on ebay last summer as repo sale and I was the winning bidder. We went and picked up the boat in Dublin OH and it was sitting on a piece of scrap trailer that we needed to make it 7 hrs home on hooked it to the truck to find no brakes on the trailer, It was a fun ride home.
So I got the boat and I have been working on it since then. I got to use it 3 or 4 times last summer with little issues coming up every time, i.e engine hatch opening then not closing, boat not starting at launch, boat not restarting on the water, loosing a trailer tire on the drive to the launch, taking on water...to name a few
Most of the issues were electrical and my brother and I have been able to fix lots of them, the hatch actuator is still goofy every so often. But it was nice to find the boat not starting issues was due to a bad sensor on the shift cable that was diabling the starter even when in nuetral.
At the end of last fall I had a new custom trailer made for the boat so we should have fewer issues trailering the boat.
The other really crappy thing about this boat was that It had black bottom paint on it. Who paints the bottom of a checkmate with bottom paint I dont know but it did help me get a great deal
. So i started the process of bottom paint removal the previous owner promised me he did not rough sand the surface to put the paint on. After getting into the project I realized a few things, 1) The checmicals to remove bottom paint are just nasty 2) It takes a crap load of time 3) I did not have the proper set-up for removal and all those checmicals were seeping into the grass were my daughter is crawling 4) It takes time (my wife and I just had our first baby last May..time no longer exists the way it used to)
So as I read on another forum DONT REMOVE BOTTOM PAINT...pay someone else to, so I did. The get was not too scratched up underneath but it was all stained yellow from the black paint so we coated the bottom with interluxin underwater expoxy and the boat looks great.
So it is now out of storage and getting detailed and cleaned and buffed back to the shine it deserves. My Goal is to get all of the oxidation out of the gel and get it shinning bright once again.
So thank you everyone on this site for the hours I have wasted reading funny stories and rants and also all the great help I have found searching this site. I will get pics up as soon as I can.
The next three years were painful as I had to find a boat close to the enforcer at a price range under 25K. And being the cheap bastard that I am, it had to be a really good deal too. So i found my 283 with a HP500 in cleveland on craigslist. I worked the owner over for a while and we finally agreed on a fair price 18K. All he needed was a release of the lein from the bank, oh yeah and he was behind payments and upside down on the boat, So for another 10 months went back and forth with Key Bank trying to buy the boat on a short sale. Making a long story longer the bank ended up getting repossesed and dissappeared. It popped up on ebay last summer as repo sale and I was the winning bidder. We went and picked up the boat in Dublin OH and it was sitting on a piece of scrap trailer that we needed to make it 7 hrs home on hooked it to the truck to find no brakes on the trailer, It was a fun ride home. So I got the boat and I have been working on it since then. I got to use it 3 or 4 times last summer with little issues coming up every time, i.e engine hatch opening then not closing, boat not starting at launch, boat not restarting on the water, loosing a trailer tire on the drive to the launch, taking on water...to name a few
Most of the issues were electrical and my brother and I have been able to fix lots of them, the hatch actuator is still goofy every so often. But it was nice to find the boat not starting issues was due to a bad sensor on the shift cable that was diabling the starter even when in nuetral.
At the end of last fall I had a new custom trailer made for the boat so we should have fewer issues trailering the boat.
The other really crappy thing about this boat was that It had black bottom paint on it. Who paints the bottom of a checkmate with bottom paint I dont know but it did help me get a great deal
. So i started the process of bottom paint removal the previous owner promised me he did not rough sand the surface to put the paint on. After getting into the project I realized a few things, 1) The checmicals to remove bottom paint are just nasty 2) It takes a crap load of time 3) I did not have the proper set-up for removal and all those checmicals were seeping into the grass were my daughter is crawling 4) It takes time (my wife and I just had our first baby last May..time no longer exists the way it used to)So as I read on another forum DONT REMOVE BOTTOM PAINT...pay someone else to, so I did. The get was not too scratched up underneath but it was all stained yellow from the black paint so we coated the bottom with interluxin underwater expoxy and the boat looks great.
So it is now out of storage and getting detailed and cleaned and buffed back to the shine it deserves. My Goal is to get all of the oxidation out of the gel and get it shinning bright once again.
So thank you everyone on this site for the hours I have wasted reading funny stories and rants and also all the great help I have found searching this site. I will get pics up as soon as I can.
to forum man! Nice boat!! Since you are from Rochester NY, do you plan on boating down on the Finger Lakes at all?? There's a few of us here that are on Kueka Lake and we are planning on a Checkmate get-together Saturday July 14, it would be great to have you to come down and cruise with us! Congrats on the boat, sounds like it's coming along good!!
