A bent, uninsured 530 Renegade picked up on Facebook Marketplace for $5,000 is the unlikely starting point for what the Tackling Australia crew say will become a six-metre tournament-grade barra boat.
In a video uploaded on 16 May 2026 — the channel's first instalment in a planned fortnightly build series — host and fabricator Brett walked viewers through day one and two of stripping the hull, chopping the sides and replacing the transom on a boat that, by his own admission, had no business being saved.
"Five thousand bucks bought us this Renegade off Marketplace, and we're going to turn this thing into a tournament fishing machine," he said in the opening shot, slapping the dented gunwale. "It had a little tumble off a boat trailer. Hit the ground doing maybe a hundred Ks an hour. No insurance. So we bought it back. We're going to fix him up."
The damage list is long: a kinked transom, dings up and down the topsides, hairline cracks and a fuel tank that was supposed to be drained but still had enough petrol sloshing in the bilge to make welding interesting. "That was supposed to have been emptied, but there was still a bit of fuel — now spilled fuel in the bottom of the boat — which is never good when you're welding," he said.
The plan, as it stood at the end of day two, is to chop the sides down 185 millimetres, build a 500-millimetre hull extension off the back, fit a bigger fuel tank, run a centre console with front and rear cast decks, and have the boat plated by a naval architect for more horsepower. The structural aluminium is 5083 grade — "all this structural stuff is all 5083, everything else we do internally will be 5005" — with a 6 mm thickness across the new transom.
Brett's approach to setting the cut line on the topsides was old-school. He levelled a laser across the hull and dragged the beam fore and aft until the profile pleased him aesthetically, then scribed it. "This boat run down 185 mil what we've cut off the side there at the transom. That's our line, that green light. Scribe it in. Then we'll run the same around the front. Hopefully line up and then we might start cutting," he said. "Did we just ruin a perfectly good boat?"
Day two added a new transom plate templated from a soft offcut, tacked into place, and the start of the hull extension — pressed up slightly over-bent so the sheet's spring tension would hold it square against the boat. "I've pressed up my profile slightly over bent. I always like to overbend them a little bit because it means you can use the tension of the sheet to hold itself in place," he said.
The build will run on a two-week release schedule. Brett is canvassing viewers for input on layout and motor choice. "There's a lot of work to be done, and when it's done, it's going to catch some fish," he said. "We want your input. Give us a hand on how to build it."
Unsurprisingly, the cleanup is the part he likes least. "It all looks good. It's fun to build, but stayed me workshop already. Just mess everywhere. It's a never-ending job of cleaning," he said. "Need a broom sponsor."