Here's one for the REAL OLD guys (meaning older than I). As a little kid in the mid-Fifties, I spent too much time staring at a one-off magazine my dad had picked up, probably a Popular Science special, on kit boats. Back in those excellent times, my dad's generation, having suffered through the Depression when they were kids, and having survived WW2, come home, married, and started families, had reached a position of having enough money that they could spend a little of it on fun stuff like boats. Being Depression-frugal do-it-yourselfers, many of them figured they could save money, and have even more fun, by building their boats themselves with plans or kits.

For what its worth, that generation did a lot of DIY projects from kits or plans, from additions to the house to ham, CB, and marine radios and "hi-fi" gear (my dad and I even built a Heathkit color TV). Heath is long-gone, as are Archer, Hallicrafters, Knight, ( some of you will recall others), and I hear that the last survivor from those days, Radio Shack, is close to going under. The DIY generation, and their sons, later got into kit and plans-built airplanes in big enough numbers that I could buy "Kitplanes" magazine off the rack at the local supermarket in the '80s and '90s.. Yet that game is in decline now, too. At the local big Experimental Aircraft Assn fly-in in 2013, I was disappointed to see that the numbers of little owner-built airplanes were way, way down from ten to fifteen years earlier.

Well, before this degenerates into another pining-for-the-Good-Old-Days thread, back to boats. In that kit-boats magazine were photos and short descriptions of two raceboat kits. The first of these, now rare but still better known, was the Chris Craft 10' Utility Racing Pram, "suitable for sanctioned racing in classes JU, AU, or BU." That's right, a pram, with a pram's truncated flat bow! But a very sleek, racy pram, a pram a Seattle kid obsessed with the Slo-Mo Unlimited hydros could get excited about. I googled this a few minutes ago; Chris Craft sold over a thousand of these kits, and there are a few still around. The second such kit, by Custom-Craft, was very similar, though it actually looked like it would be a better raceboat, having softer chine angles. I found nothing about it on Google.

So, sixty years later, I'm wondering if anybody here had/build/raced or just saw either of these little pram-runabouts at a boatrace . . . ??