This is my Mirage Intruder, not a bad boat but it needed some loving because it’s had a hard life. I picked up the boat after it sat on blocks behind a house for the last 7 years uncovered most of the time.

Day 1. Lucky I had a 22' trailer available to go pick her up with.

I have the same boat that I got this summer. Mine is in the water and we are using it while I slowly clean her up and make it shine again. Keep us updated on it.

You should post some pics. I need to make a rear hatch for this thing and could use some pics of how the original ones were. It looks like they might have been three pieces but I’m not sure how they attached.

I would love to see that also mine is one big piece that someone made before me.

I probably went about this in the wrong order but I couldn’t wait to see if I could get her to shine up again.

Where can you buy more elbow grease? I am 100% out after wet sanding this thing and I’m still not happy with the finish because I have a lot of sanding marks I cant get to go away.

Looks great after the sanding!

The next thing that I did was to get everything out of the boat so I could see what I was working with.
Not good but not bad at the same time because the majority of wood was solid but I did have some rot to deal with. The back bench seat crumbled to pieces when we went to lift it out, the floor under the driver’s seat was soft, the floor inside the cabin was completely rotted and all of the wood around the tank was rotted.
The only other major thing needing fixed was that the gas tank was leaking through a cracked weld on the bottom, not sure if I did that when moving it or if it was already there.


I was surprised that the floor was made from two layers of ¾” wood.




When I removed the floor in the cuddy I had found a lake of gasoline from the crack in the tanks weld.


Nasty old gasoline and oil soaked foam.

I had to completely rebuild the rear bench seat because it was completely rotted. I reused the foam and seat cover because it was still it pretty fair condition.

The original bilge area looked horrible so I had painted which made a big difference.



It didn’t take long before I had decided that the gray looked old and dingy so again I repainted it with a white.