Holy crap… I don’t think we’re gonna have to do brakes this week. I bought this abandoned 1977 Glastron Sea Star off Facebook Marketplace for a grand, and the whole goal was simple: get a 20-years-sitting 70s speedboat with a small block Ford 302 running again and see if it’ll actually survive a real lake test for the 4th of July. We had four days, an OMC drive I’d never worked on, and a whole lot of “please don’t be a nightmare like the last one.” We started with the basics—battery, crank test, spark—and it actually cranked great and had spark right away. Then we hit the fuel system and found the nastiest rusty water/fuel milkshake I’ve ever seen, plus a carb that looked like it had lived underwater and a fuel line that literally exploded. We ended up robbing a marine fuel pump, filter, and a cleaner 2-barrel carb off a $400 parts boat just to keep moving, then got it to run on a temporary tank once we fixed a busted base gasket. From there it was all the boat-specific headaches: cooling passages packed full of junk, tilt/trim weirdness, electric shift concerns, corroded ballast-resistor wiring, and chasing little gremlins like gauge lights and a “sticky” fuel gauge somebody labeled years ago. Biggest takeaway: a cheap revival is never “just throw a battery in it”—especially when the fuel tank starts leaking the moment you clean the junk out of it.