TOPIC: '58 Texas Maid Osprey

I have recently inherited my granddad's old boat. It's been parked up on the hill behind the pump house at our family lake house for many years. Although the reg tag says the last yr it was registered was 1980, a TPWD search says the last registration expired in 1995. Dad said granddad must have kept renewing even though it wasn't in use. I'm 43 and have never seen it in the water. My husband works offshore so the 2 weeks that he's gone, I work on projects around the house to keep me busy. I'm about to dive head first into the restore project of this cool old boat. I have been using the google machine to try to find out as much info as possible on TM's. As you can see from the pic, there's a lot of clean up of over 40 yrs of stashed random building materials etc that has to be done to expose the complete condition to see what work I have ahead of me. The motor is not the original. The Evinrude on it now came off an old pontoon boat and is most likely an early 80's model. It ran great before they swapped out with a new, bigger motor for the pontoon boat.
In the end, I will be stripping off all the paint and polishing the aluminum on the hull (instead of repainting it white) and repainting the top and all the accents of the boat in red. I'd like to restore it as close as possible to the original appearance. If anyone has any idea of what the original seats looked like, that would be so helpful! I'm going to restore the seats myself using plywood, marine vinyl and memory foam. I'll occasionally post my progress here. Thank you for looking!

Looks like a nice, fun project. You have your work cut out for you, but sounds like you have it under control. Keep us posted.

Make sure you find out exactly what is required by the TPWD to transfer ownership to you, TX is 1 of the states that can be difficult to register old boats and trailers. If you have that all resolved or in process, then you might start workong on it. If not, wait until you do.

Otherwise, but good for you for keeping it in the family.

There are a few images on the FG library for Texas Maids. Look thru those.

Thank you for the advice. I don't plan on putting any $ into it until I have all the paperwork taken care of. I got all the forms that TPWD told me I needed. I just have to get my aunt to sign everything as POA. I'm excited to get started but want everything to be done right and legally.
I have my mom's old '89 Ford Bronco, also red, that I plan to restore (not a whole lot needs to be done) as well and use to pull this boat. As you can tell, I'm quite sentimental.
I'm excited to get them both done!

Awesome stuff worth restoring/saving. For me - sentimental translates to more motivation and hopefully more patience. Those will look nice together. Nothing wrong with passing down family stories and family fabric. It helps my kids and grandkids know their great and gg grandpas and g-mas through saving and passing down boats. Our '56 has seen 6 generations. Good luck with all!