I know this is a very old thread, however it might be interesting reading for newbies, as well as the actual history of our boat's renovations since we purchased her in 2015, March 2015.
We bought our Columbia 30 for $10,000 Canadian Dollars and have extensively worked on just about everything essential, and now have a deep hole in our wallet but get praise in most places we visit for our summer vacations. We are proud of what we have done despite the fact that we are well past $50,000 today over the last 5 years almost. This being our 5th summer with the boat.
We started out on our 1st trip to bring the vessel home from 80 miles away up the Canadian west coast only to have the engine splutter to a halt as we entered the marina for our overnight stop on the way south. Long, very long story short, this was due to too much voltage reaching the coil and the coil was being fried to an open state and no current was reaching the electronic ignition to fire the engine. It felt like the feeling you get as you run out of fuel (gasoline in this case) Atomic 4 powered boats which have been converted to electronic ign. have to have a formula applied to decide on which ballast resistor you need to add to the coil feed side in order to limit the voltage applied to the coil, and thus solve the issue of fried coils. I got this information by pure luck, from the Moyer Marine Atomic 4 owners website forum, from a very kind member who actually worked on the Columbia production line in California, right next to where my boat was built in 1972. We spent a lot of money chasing engine issues and cooling issues and we have re-rigged standing and running rigging and done many upgrades during our constantly ongoing renovations and the list goes on and on and on..... Took lots of photos and have everything documented - we could write a book on this, maybe we should ! Anyway take the first dollar value you can think of and multiply it by 5 and you might get close.