where did the baja hulls come from??
 

tried searching, came up with nothing, even did some google, but does anyone know where those hulls came from, mostly the 420 and outlaw hulls, what were they splashed from?

They were splashed from Skaters like everything else :D


just kid'n :D those hull are quite possibly original (it does happen) they are capable of lofting their own plugs, but this is just a guess for me.:cool-smiley-011:

Baja has been around forever and is a large boat builder. Not only do they have little need to splash anything, none of their hulls would be anything you might call revolutionary. Basic 24 degree vees.

I was gonna say it was splashed from a Bayliner - but I'll take a lot of heat for that.:D:hitfan:

Baja isn't a bad hull, just from my experience, it's on the lower end of performance hulls.
Forgive me if I once again have an unpopular opinion - I'm not necessarily known for the popular opinion thing around here.

To answer your query, I think Dave is right. I've never heard of a Baja hull being splashed from another boat. I think they may be original design, but based off proven hulls.

Isnt the 36 a 35 Cig hull??

thats what made me wonder if they came from anything, because they are just a straight vee 24 degree, could have came from anywhere, maybe they did make there own??

Yeah...the older 36 was a Cig mold, but since Baja was bought by Brunswick (parent company of Sea-Ray, Mercury Marine and many others) they have plenty of capitol to be designing their own hulls. They are one of the only manufacturers to be using wind tunnel testing to increase speed...after all, more of the boat is cutting through the air than is though water. I read where they gained 2-3 mph with the deck design of the 30 Outlaw. Even the tappered corners at the side/transom affected the speed....very interesting.

http://www.bajamarine.com/index.asp?...science&tab=1&

Didn't it get started at Chekmate?

Yes, it did. The owner of Checkmate and the original owner of Baja were in business together back in the 60's. In fact, the owner of Checkmate was a boat dealer that got into the boat building business back in the late 50's, early 60's.

There was a parting of the ways sometime in the 60's and Baja was born using one of the 16' Checkmate molds. Baja was eventually bought by Brunswick after bouncing around a bit. I'm not sure if the original Baja owner sold it to Brunswick or if it has some intermediate ownership. The late 80's, early 90's were tough for Baja and it's from that period that they got such a bad performance / quality reputation.

BTW, I know this because my father bought one of the first Checkmate hulls as well as a resale boat from Bill Combs, the founder of Checkmate, before Checkmate was born. It wasn't pretty from what he told me, porpoised so bad they took the boat back and replaced it with a redesigned version. That was back around '59 or 60, I think. My father has passed so I can't ask him for details.

I'm also pretty sure the Brunswick Marine has a 5 axis CnC setup that cuts the hull and deck plugs instead of using the older, manual method of building plugs by hand.

The factory is located in Bucyrus, Ohio, about an hour north of Columbus. Very large and well laid out facility. I visited the factory around 1990 and at that time they appeared to be verticaly integrated and performing all of their lay ups and rigging.

Rumor is that the Baja 302 was a splash off the 28 Apache

Filling in some blanks for ya......

Checkmate was founded by Bill Downard.......and Bill Combs, who were partners in a Bucyrus, Ohio Mercury outboard dealership. These two created the first Checkmates in 1964, first by "splashing" a 13 foot Norris Craft, with a semi flat bottom and "runners". Later they "splashed" various Glastron hulls and added basically flat decks to create their Vee bottom models (13', 14' and 16'). The signature attribute of all Checkmates back then was the Metalflake gel coat in a myriad of colors.

Bill Downard's son, Mike, became a Mercury/OMC team tunnel boat driver of some repute and won a prestigious Kiekhaefer Scholarship as I recall. Sadly Bill Downard passed away and the world seemingly forgot he ever existed in later years, but, in reality, he was the brains and the stability of the partnership, with Combs being somewhat of a latter day P.T. Barnum in many respects.

Baja was an early local spinoff and started with "splashes" of Checkmates.

Both of these companies made their reputations on the old Outboard Performance Craft (OPC), APBA and NOA racing circuits, which were the venues in which all of the key performance boats ( Allison, Glastron, Eltro, Hydrostream, Switzer, etc) showed their stuff. Most of the hull design features from that era ( Pad bottoms, Aerodynamic decks, steps, wings, cored construction, bonded decks and hulls, etc) are marketed currently as the "revolutionary" features the world swallows as new from the various Offshore Performance builders of today.

Here's a 1966 Pad bottom, vee hull, balsa cored, Allison with an "aero lift" deck and bow configuration (sort of a "beak" plus).

T2x

Total bull$hit. Everyone knows Reggie invented all that stuff.
;)

yeah chris, i think i read that somewhere too......

Probably in a Fountain ad.......... but he ain't the only builder claiming to have invented the wheel.:p

The OL that everyone refers to in the Baja section....mean Outerlimits, so that must be where their latest hulls came from.:D

They look like one of those Cig boats to me :D But then they all do :D

Thanks for filling in the details. Like I said, I only had a story my dad told me years ago. Obviously I had my dates wrong but at least I got the lineage right ;)

As I remember it's likely he bought a boat from Combs while he still had the dealership but before he started building boats. I do know that boat was a disaster and Bill replaced it once he drove it.

It's funny how things tie back to each other. A friend of mine got the idea to build a pad bottomed, reverse chine, stepped transom boat directly from his success racing Allison's. In fact I believe Allison helped him design the hull that was the first V-Bottomed boat to break 100 mph. Any guesses who that "friend" might be :D

Steve Stepp

Steve is also a friend of mine for many years.......

He was a champion OPC racer in his own right and drove, among other things, Allisons much like mine pictured earlier in this thread.

He has always credited Allison for many of his hull design ideas rather than claiming that he "invented" stuff.

In fact, with todays drives, engines, composite materials and props, a properly scaled up version of that 1966 Allison design would run as fast or faster than any offshore vee hull today.

T2x

If you look at the bottom of a Velocity, especially the old 30 (new 322) IMHO that's exactly what you'll see. That's not in any way a slight on Steve's adaptation of the design and like you said, he has no qualms crediting Allison with his inspiration.

I really enjoyed seeing your old JJ class Allison. It brought back memories of our old OPC racing days. The only JJ class Allison I can ever remember seeing was in the mid 70's at the APBA/OPC World Championship race at Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia. It was also the only 18' Allison I have ever seen. It was a much deeper boat than 15' and 16' model Allisons. My buddy bought a brand new 15' Allison in 1974. He ran an Evinrude X-115 racing motor on it in UI class. I bought a brand new 14' Allison in 1976 and powered it with an Merc 85 in Family G class. They were fun boats to race.
We used to race against many Checkmates and Hydro-Streams in the early years. The first time I saw a Baja hull I thought it was a Checkmate because it was identical to the Checkmate hull. Also, I have always heard that before Reggie ever built his first Fountain boat he spent some time talking to Paul Allison about hull design. Thus the beak nose. Allison had it long before Reggie even thought about building boats. I am not bashing Reggie. I think he is a genius when it comes to designing and racing boats. My personal boat is a Fountain.