1955 CommuterRestore

Was just admiring Todd’s Penn Yan over on Woodyboater Nice work Todd and family!!

One of the sweetest marine engines I’ve seen, beauty.

With the talk of Todd's Commuter in the Collegian thread I went back to look at this thread and realized I never added photos of the finished boat so I found a few Todd sent me a while back. I'll try to find some good ones of the motor. One thing is for certain this thing is a head turner and it's a rocket ship with the Hemi in it.     

Just a quick update on the boat....this weekend Alan came down and got the exhaust hole for th 6cly glassed up and smoothed. After a little paint you will never know it was there. The wiring is basically done and the engine turns over. Plumbing is all but done. Exhaust is connected and ready to belch out a bunch of music! It is about water ready. We need to get the ol girl off the dollies and on the trailer to make the trek to the paint booth where we will lay down the final coat of varnish. Wood Windshield templates are cut and ready to be dropped off to make windshield glass.

I'm not good with posting pictures so I will work on getting some up at some point. But the boat name will be created this week and applied the following. Its goign to be be neat when it is done. Can't wait to share it with everyone. Alan has been the backbone of this project and can't thank him enough!!!

Heyyyy...great idea Pete! .. .nuthin rong with a lil rednek enjineering.. lol

Yea, you've been spending way too much time on Lawn Tractor Fan

It will be interesting to find out how the Commuter rides but I'm guessing it too will be bow high. Maybe not as much as the Hurricane but all the hulls back then ran bow high. I'm going to take a guess that when CC decided to make the Hurricane runabout, they knew with the engine farther aft in the same Commuter hull, there would be a bow high issue so they decided to tack on the hull bottom/transom extension built in trim tab!!

8122pbrainard wrote: Alan, I see the Hemi was an option for the Commuter so, did CC Todds dog house big enough for it?

LOL, Hell No Pete! She's got broad shoulders. Doghouse is on our list, luckily the motor change came about before the upholsterer started.

The duals are cool. I'd try disabling the secondaries before going to a single.

Riley wrote: That boat is looking nice! Will that engine handle both of those carbs?

They're a bit much Bruce. The originals would have been WCFB Carters with about 375 CFM each depending on the model.   The Edelbrocks came on the engine so we'll run it as is and try to tune it the best we can and go from there.   The other option is to go with a single four barrel like on mine but these look to cool not to give them a try first.

Beautiful!

Can’t wait to see that in person...white lake?

Nice progress

Nice work gang

Time flies! Time for a Commuter update and what a cool update this will be. Exciting news on the power plant.

Todd located a Chrysler Hemi up in Canada last December so he made a deal and hit the road.   We weren't exactly sure what it was because the original engine badge was missing . It had dual quads so it was either a 331 at 250 hp or a 354 at 275 hp. How could you go wrong with that right?

Anyway the motor made it home and I headed down to the farm the next Saturday to see if we could get it running. It came out of a big Greavette that was being repowered and it supposedly ran. We spent a few hours checking it out, getting fuel and power hooked up. It spun over easy by hand so we oiled it up and turned the key.   Took a few cranks but eventually fired up and sounded pretty darn good. Oddly enough it developed a miss after a few minutes so we shut it down and decided to do a compression test. Found one dead cylinder and one with about 50 psi so the heads had to come off.

this is what we found. The old sodium filled exhaust valves were pretty beat so the heads got sent out and refurbished from top to bottom. New guides and oversize valves.


We decided to load the motor up and bring it to my shop so we could work inside in the heat. Once we got the heads back we did some cleaning up of parts and sprayed it.













Loading her back up for the drive south to the farm, gift wrapped for Renee!


We did verify from casting numbers and measuring the bore that it is a 331 at .030 over so it's a 250 Hp version. very cool motor to say the least.