Vintage Boat Company's Of Yesteryear...

[FUJIMO]

[FUJIMO]

...before the beak went on it. to think that all reginald fountain did, was copy someone elses existing hull AND deck, and market it his own way...

[FUJIMO]

[David]

...before the beak went on it. to think that all reginald fountain did, was copy someone elses existing hull AND deck, and market it his own way...

Fountain added a pad and a notched transom. It wasn't just marketing. Steve Step came out with a pad offshore hull at close to the same time. I don't know who was first. The test article says that Fountain worked with Allison on the design. The Step article says that the bottom is similar to an Allison. I suppose that could be said of all pad V bottoms

[FUJIMO]

...intimately familiar with both velocity & the fountain executioner. the wide pad above was a test/prototype boat. that specific wide pad design was not used on any other boats that followed. comepletely different design pad went on future production boats. stepped transoms were common on many other offshore vee-hulls then, both outboard & inboard. chris*craft, for instance, bought the same hull & decks, from bill farmer, out of the exact same molds, the same year as fountain & private labeled them as excalibur executioners. the next year, chris*craft called them scorpions. they all had stepped transoms. i was with the country's largest dollar volume c*c dealer at the time & delivered many of them. knew everyone at the factory in bradenton, florida. reggie is a salesman, first & foremost.

[powerabout]

are we talking flat pad or a vee pad?

[David]

"reggie is a salesman, first & foremost."



It's interesting to see a different perspective than what I read decades ago. Powerboat portraited him as a guy who followed new tech (notched pad bottoms, later steps) quickly and spent time fine tuning and optimizing his hull design and set ups. Of course in 1982 I was 24, fresh out of school, and out of money. I'd never seen an offshore boat.

[FUJIMO]

...powerboat...this fountain & garbrecht initial collaboration promotional boat was, obviously, more of a very wide, basically flat pad. the "fountain" production boats that followed, came from new tooling(hull molds) that he put more of a v-shaped pad on. it was an over-rated design that he promoted as earth shattering, simply because it was on an offshore boat. s. stepps pad design was better, yet also "added" to someone elses existing production hull & deck out of miami, the 29 mirage, that cortez was manufacturing...

[FUJIMO]

...kilo's, new orleans, 1983, 30 velocity, https://youtu.be/G_T3kXdtTFY ...the next year at the kilo's in wyandotte, michigan, he went even faster. the only time a fountain so-called pad bottom was faster in the early years, was because reggie put much more horsepower between the stringers than the 30 velocity. both reggie and steve knew how to rig a transom like an opc racer. this was both of their strong points...

[David]

Nice looking run, looks stable. They ran the bow high like a VKing

[David]

The advertisement is from a 1984 Powerboat, I still have a Hoss Triton for my SS2000

[David]

From April 1987 Powerboat. The results were from 1986 MVP racing

[Jimboat]

great thread! lot's of great history here!

[FUJIMO]

[bertsboat]

Arenacraft Barracuda Sportster 1955, Bert Harris