A 351w (stroker?) from scratch...

The block has only been machined once (other than stock), and since its getting nothing more than cleaned out now, and still shows crosshatching from the one time its been machined I am not worried about it.

There may have been debris from the previous gear failure in the oil passageway as I did not take it apart and clean it out after that. That might have contributed to the failure, but since all the oil ended up in the bilge and there was none in the pan.. Ockams's razor says thats the primary cause running out of oil.

The debris in the pan is certainly all from the bearing and the previous gear failure. It basically oozed paper thin wafers of the bearing out the side.

As for the way I put in the extra guage a very similar setup of the same size parts are hanging off tens of thousands of motors out there, including kieths old boat pictured back here. Follow the instructions with your new additional sender and thats how its done, the failure was indeed the thin walled chinese junk plumbing part. The guages don't need any flow so a thick walled part from the brake parts bin is the way to be..

They all reduce, thats the size of every sending unit 1/8 npt, the aluminum hex stock is from pcm, that fitting in the end of the aluminum hex stock is the stock PCM fitting. All this stuff is necessary to get the two required sending units in the space left on the motor. Yes there is a longer moment arm on this setup than on the other one I showed but that is trival in comparison the difference in strength between the thin walled fitting and the proper brake line fittings at more than twice the wall thickness.

Bottom line, I built a motor, I beat the crud out of it, I broke it, now I am telling others perhaps to help them not break thiers.

I appreciate the questions that help me keep from breaking another, but lets not get into semantics. Nobody wants to hear about poor surface finish on cheaply cut threads causing premature fatigue failure due to stress crack propagation or that in reality all you need to do is double the wall thickness and you move so far out on the S-N curve that its never going to break even without taking into account how much better cut the threads on the hydralic fittings are.. boring stuff.. hell a damn zip tie around the whole thing to the oil filter probably would have made the biggest difference.

You know its summer when, Joe finally starts putting his boat back together.

So as mentioned elsewhere I am going for a few changes this year, mostly to satisfy my own curiousity.. as the boat was a good enough runner for a day to day skiboat last year.

Sorry for the photo quality this time around someone decided they needed my digital camera more than I did so I am down to just the phone for documentation purposes.


A couple of the block back from being checked and honed.




I spent a while deciding what ring gaps I wanted to run, eventually settled at .026 top and .026 for the second. Then it was only a matter of insert, square, measure, remove, grind, debur, repeat till done then repeat for the next ring.. here are the tools involved.



I measured the crank after it was ground and polished .010 under, but I still like to crush some plastigage to make sure, picture also shows the aftermath of being balanced, for the second time.



With the crank back in after checking clearance.



Lube and bearings used..



Then the documenation falls apart a bit and here we jump ahead to after the pistons, rings, connecting rods are all installed. Along with the cam, timing set, timing cover, waterpump, oil pan, lifters, and head studs. Nothing too exciting to note only thing different from the last time around at this point is the timing set. It was a comp cams piece that included a torrington bearing on the cam gear, no difference on the install except the thrust plate needed to be counterbored so the mounting screws would sit below the thrust plate surface so as to not interfear with the bearing.



Same retrofit roller rockers as last year..



The last peices that took the longest to decide on and obtain, trickflow twisted wedge heads.







Nothing terribly out of the ordinary with the exhaust ports. They are located in the stock location. However the Valve cover rail is raised to allow you to fit rollers under stock covers. This causes me a problem in that I already have a few pairs of tall covers and I can't use them with these heads and my Hiteks, so short valve covers have been ordered.



More shots of the Exhaust ports, these are "fast as cast" heads which are claimed to compete out of the box with CNC ported heads. However there was bowl blend performed on them at Total Engine Airflow













The combustion chambers are fully CNC machined, and nicely done. A big problem with my last set of heads was serious sharp spots between the valves that took a lot of work to smooth out. All that smoothing out added a lot of volume and cost me compression. Here the heads started at 66cc and they were milled down to 58cc while at TEA to give me the around 10.3 compression I was looking to get.








The whole schtick to these heads is that the valves are rotated from the stock location. In essence this moves the intake valve closer to the intake port opening and the exhaust valve closer to the exhaust valve opening. The valves are 2.02 on the intake and 1.60 on the exhaust.



I tried to get a few shots of the intake port but its much longer and harder to do with a cellphone..









The upgraded springs and tool steel retainers were specified by the cam designer and builder Jay Allen from Camshaft Innovations

The 3/8" arp studs and twisted wedge specific guideplates come with the heads.



Thats it so far, my pushrod length checker was out of its range so I am waiting for a full set to come in the mail, once that arrives I can measure that out, check clearance and bolt the heads down.

Joe, Are those guide plates standard spacing? I recall seeing the adjustable Isky plates on your old pair. The larger valves require a larger valve centerline and the standard guide plates don't work. I'm wondering if the offset valves gets the centerline back to original specs.

I found that out when assembling the valve train with my RHS heads. No matter what I tried I couldn't get the rocker arms to sit straight, a little internet research and I found the Isky plates. I will never stop learning with this hobby although I'm a little surprised they came from the head Preparer with the incorrect guide plates.

Very cool. Care to share what Jay Allen projected for hp/rpm's for this little package? Ive gotta imagine youre in the 450+ range, no?

FYI, Ive got those props from Acme that I told you about on the way to me for testing. I bet you'll have a better chance at turning them than I do... Ill see if Bill will extend my trial period through GL. Specs on the 2 are 13.25X15.5, .060 cup (1490) and 13.5X16, .105 cup (1492). Both are 4 blades, unfortunately.

81nautique wrote: I'm assuming that boat is coming to GL this year?

Good golly I hope so, I am itching to get into skiing and this is the boat in line to pull me so if it aint in the water a week before the 4th of july things might get drastic.

Tim, do what you can to hold onto them props I have accepted that I am going to be running a 4 blade so at this point its just a matter of what runs best, a 16 pitch maybe the ticket..

As to HP, no comment, I dont think it actually matters nearly as much as the overall combo and how you get it to the water.. anyway it dont matter too much as long as it is at least 410hp.. hate to get beat by a stock small block chevy.

Today I got the heads drilled, and installed and the intake rough ported. Tomorrow hopefully I see if the stock height valve covers allow the new heads to play nice with the old hiteks.

Luchog wrote: the 1492 is the RH version of the 547 wich is stock in Malibu v-drives. I'm very interested in knowing how those props worked for you Tim.

I believe the 1490/1492 are also just smaller bore (1" vs, 1-1/8") of some of the CC V-drive props.

My guess is that I wont be able to turn them- Ive found my boat performs best with the smaller 3-blades that have me turning 5200. But who knows! I bet Joe could make good use of them though.

Joe,

With all the shiny valve train parts it would be a shame to cover them up.

You need these; Valve Covers

Luchog, I just put the label front to the front, I believe that ends up covering the front and leaving open the back but don't quote me.

I got the boat all wired up and in the water finally on Friday. She is past the first oil change and hopefully after this evening will be ready to come out and get her second one. Looks like we will have two days of pretty poor weather tuesday and wednesday so I will hopefully pull it out, modify the box to fit with the new spark arrestor (currently I am running the original one cut way down), install some board racks, switch to synthetic, and call it good enough to finally get some watersports in.

Final pre GL updates...

The boat runs really well. It has not stalled in two weeks of use, even when the idle was rediculously low. I don't know if the msd ignition does anything on the top end but it is just really darn smooth on the low end and mid range, and this is with a single plane intake and relatively big cam and heads, I couldn't be happier with it (famous last words). But, I haven't had the opportunity to really get into tuning her, between someone stealing my hand held gps and the perfect pass tach and speedometer limits being exceeded I can't say much other than she goes past 5k rpm and can bury the airguides.

I have been waiting on a larger spark arrestor to do some tuning as the motor is running really rich, but it won't arrive before GL so I will leave it rich and with the 29 degrees of total timing I have been running to keep it on the safe side. That should leave me some room to try some bigger props, if I can get a hold of a prop puller and trbenj comes through with some demo acme units.

Other than prop changes and fitting the bigger spark arrestor (if it ever arrives) in the next month, I will probably wait till september to move to the bigger carb get into serious tuning and increase the rev limiter.

I saw that you brought home another lost puppy. What's going on with this boat and motor?

On the coosa board, anyone find a source for this for a decent price?

JoeinNY wrote: Carpet is on order, and I dropped a pile of parts off at the powder coater at lunch today, and that should be the last money I ever spend on this boat.... yeah right..

Enjoying the thread, but this is a classic "quote"!!