Stuck piston...nnnzzzzzzz!

John Beardslee said:

Hey Andy did you notice the slider pipes?

John

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John Beardslee said:

Hey Dick,

We didn't call it sticking a piston - just melting a piston or more. If you were going to run with the "Big Dogs" you melted a piston in the last heat of each class at the end of the day. If it was a 2 day race, everyone else went out for dinner - we rebuilt engines - carried lots of new pistons and rings. The Loopers were much easier rebuild as they had a split crankcase and a removable head. The old 30H, 55H & 75H Mercs were a 2 man job just to get the rings compressed and into the jug. No split crankcase and a one piece jug with no removable head. We used to lay the powerheads in our lap, yuk. Thank goodness we have selective memories - if it hadn't been for this thread I wouldn't have thought of it. On the F-Hydro, the engines were run high enough that an auxillary rudder was used to get the boat to turn on the course, we used rev sticks to lift the engines, rev sticks were pieces of old wooden yard sticks cut to short lengths and taped together in different thickness for each prop. When's the last time you saw a wooden yard stick? Many people ran "Chris Go" fuel direct from Quincy Welding Products (mfgr of the Looper engines) but my family mixed there own, using methanol, castor and later Klotz Techniplate. I think the 80-20 mix is what we used as that's what I mixed when I started running toy boats in 1969.

John

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John Beardslee said:

I forgot to add about the megaphone stacks, they scavanged really well when you got the length right but with no converging cone and stinger you wasted a lot of fuel and it took a larger tank than after "Tuned Pipes" came along. The megaphones on the Loopers were cast aluminum and were held in the manifold pocket and filler block with coil springs. My Dad & uncle's background in motorcycle racing was a great resource, I had some engines they had adapted to run Harley Davison coils and battery ignition instead of a magneto. To run Alky and perform well you ran really high compression compared to gas (stock outboard) and the pit crew would have to lift the back of the hull high enough to get the prop out of the water and use a half wrap of rope to start. A friend of ours had a 75 cubic inch Evinrude with big Greeves Blooy pipes that was fast enough to break the Outboard speed record but they could never get it started at the Kilo's or Speed trials. The crew would lift the boat, his dad sat on a stool and put both feet on the side of the block to pull start with a rope half wrap. A lot of the stock engines had a timing advance geared to the throttle, but I don't recall any fuel boats using that, timing was critical and you used to sneak up on the ideal number, we used light bulbs or buzzer and degree wheels to set the points and timing. The thrill of speed over water is at least twice that over land and the adrenaline rush is the same no matter how you get it, full size or toy, it's all good.

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