Few projects on YouTube start as ambitiously as the one Tackling Australia premiered on 16 May 2026. The brief: take a crashed, uninsured Renegade 530 bought off Facebook Marketplace for $5,000, cut it in half, extend it, replate the transom for more horsepower, and turn out the other end with a tournament-grade barra boat.
The host, who runs the fabrication side of the build, did not pretend the hull was a good buy. "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 cold-open, pointing out a bent transom, cracks along the gunwale and dings stretching the length of both topsides. "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."
Day one was reserved for stripping. The first surprise: the fuel tank still had product in it. "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.
With the tank, fuel filter, hoses and most of the loose wiring out, the laser came up to set a new sheer line. The cut he settled on dropped the topside by 185 millimetres, giving the boat what he called a sleeker, more barra-suited profile with 600 millimetres of freeboard at the transom.
"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," he said. The cut, freehand on a grinder, drew the obvious admission: "Did we just ruin a perfectly good boat?"
The answer, by the end of day two, was no — but only just. The new transom was templated from a soft offcut, traced into 6 mm 5083-grade plate, and tacked into place. Structural pieces — gussets, flat bars, a length of 6 mm pipe through the bottom of the transom — were welded in to stop the rear from folding under the planned engine upgrade. The naval architect's letter for the plating job requires a 500 mm hull extension off the back, which had also been pressed up over-bent so the spring tension of the sheet would hold it against the boat as it was tacked.
"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 explained.
Day two ended with a six-metre overall hull sitting on the workshop floor, the transom welded out, and the next jobs queued up — fuel tank, foam flotation, then the floor and cast decks. The plan, still loose, is a centre console with a forward and rear casting deck, a bigger fuel tank than the original carried, and ultimately more horsepower than the previous owner ever pushed through the hull.
The channel is asking viewers to weigh in on the rest of the layout. "There's a lot of work to be done, and when it's done, it's going to catch some fish," the host said. "We want your input."
The most candid line of the video had nothing to do with welding. "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."