On ebay now a Checkmate cat, never knew they made one ???

There was lots of talk about the Checkmate Cats on Checkmate-boats.com. There were very few built and they were designed by Linder if I remember correctly. They were not built at the Checkmate factory but Checkmate had alot of imput as to the design cues to keep the boat looking like the Checkmates of the time. Not sure how well the boat ran but Checkmate decided to focus on their V bottoms and discontinued the cat.

its my understanding that the boat is extremely slow for its size with the outboard setup it originally had....

i have ridden in one and they feel nose heavy ....with a pair of 2.5 200s the boat could bareley run 75mph....

the guy in that ad claims that with a pair of SALTWATER RACING MOTORS??????that it went 135mph...that boat couldnt do 135 going downhill with a tailwind and triple 300x's....

the guy also thinks he has something special because its HAND WRAPPED BALSA...i guess he means hand laid...the boat is no different then any other checkmate of that era which is well built....

as far as the I/O conversion...that i am not too sure about...that boat never had a stringer system setup for an I/O....

for the price he wants he is outta his mind IMHO....he thinks it will only cost $5000.00 to make it right....Dreamer...the one i have ridden in is a friend of mine and he got the boat for $1500.00 rigged on a trailer with no motors.....

From what I heard, the owner of Checkmate got into a personal dispute of some kind with whoever designed the boat. After only building a few, to prove his point, he retired the molds and refused to build another cat. The molds are alive and well, and there was talk fairly recently about starting to lay up a few new hulls. I have no idea what transpired, or how the boats actually handled.

There was a Checkmate CAt raceboat as well, Topaz

the molds are in N.Y. now. A friend of mine has them and would love to sell'em

my friend bought and still owns the TOPAZ raceboat....it has a pair of 200s on it and runs like a brick throug water....

It's for sale again.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eB...m=300140575999
I think you would be money ahead buying the molds from Chris (sterndrivespec) and building your own...