14 foot starcraft... middle seat removal?

i am seriously thinking about ripping out the middle seat of my boat, just to free up space, along with that i would be putting in a floor and im sure i would be bracing the sides to the floor and the bottom of the boat, i hear some people say itll be fine, while others say never take out a middle seat.. with bracing would it be ok?

It will be fine as long as you dont try an put a huge motor on the back of it, i have no middle seat and i notice no flexing what so ever on the water or on the trailer, i have no braces thats what the gunrail is there for it takes a good amount of force to make the boat bend or flex.

I have found that most of the folks who say never to take it out have never taken it out.

I have heard a couple, only a couple, guys saying they did remove it and didn't like it. But most of the guys that have done it, from what I have read, have posted no problems.

If your boat is properly berthed/bunked on the trailer, and providing you do not overload it with gear (coolers, tents and cooking wear) when you travel to the water you should be just fine.

"Most boat hulls see a lot more abuse off the water than they will ever seen on it...." :twisted:

So, in other words,its not going to hurt anything... I plan on putting some storage along the sides and I was going to attach them to the sides of the boat... I figured that would be plenty of "bracing" for the sides and to keep the boat from flexing.

As long as you are tieing that bracing back to your new floor it should be similiar to the seat support. A hull that flexes more than stock, will eventually fatigue crack before the stock one, with the exact same conditions. For any metal, it is the number of flex cycles and the magnitude of the flex. Most of us don't ride in waters where you accumulate many flex cycles of large magnitude. Not trying to scare you, just realize there is not a simple yes/no answer.

The bigger issue is usually finding a place to put floatation foam lost from seat removal.

My 15' Fisher's original setup was a front deck about 18" deep, 2 pedestal seats and a side console. There was absolutely nothing that tied the 2 sides together. It's a 1977 model and there are no signs of any cracking or flex damage over the years. It has some pretty heavy duty gunrails and there is some added aluminum along the sides for the side panels, which I'm sure give it some added strength. So I think a lot of what you can and can't do will depend on the conditions the boat is subjected to and how the boat is constructed. Like FuzzyGrub said above, there is no simple answer because there are a lot of factors to take into consideration and fatigue is something that may not show up for a long time.

Unless you are running FT, slapping the bow of your boat on the next wake the majority of the time, your hull will not see the flexing that will crack the hull. If your boat is sitting in/on the water (displacement) the weight is distributed in such a way to provide support to prevent stress fractures.

Now having said that I will follow it up by saying this principal only works providing you have the size motor specified by the manufacture, and your boat is loaded properly. [-o<

see, stuff like this makes me feel good about doing it. im gonna do it, i may even put my boat in the project section, even tho ive done alot of the work already lol... this is going to be an awesome boat by the time i am done with it, not that it isnt great now, but its gonna be wayyyy better when im done haha