offshore riggers from japan!

here are a couple photos of offshore riggers from Japan that hammer sent us:

Thanks for posting the pics Tom. Get your fishing boat in the water yet?

I will exlain to you what these boats are. They are called Choukyori Hydros in Japan. I believe that Japan is the only country that has a class for them. They are used to race a 12km race on very, very rough water.

Stuff that would make you sea sick if you were in a real boat. The top picture is the engine room of a .21 rigger.

As you can see, it is mounted backward, and underneath it there is a gearing down system. The ratio is not much. It depends on the person, but I believe that they run about .85 to 1. This allows you to use a larger prop.

In the Choukyori race, the boats are only allowed to use straight fuel. The carving you have to do on the inside of your engine to make it scream with striaght fuel is unbelievable. Most of the people who do this race use Rossi Rex engines in the .21 class. Don't know why, but they all had them. If you have noticed, there is now needle valve in the carburator. If you look, there is a horn under the pipe coupler. That is the remote needle.

They control is with a 3rd channel.

Down to the pic below. This is my friend's boat. It is also a .21 class. It is 175 cm long. About 2 yards. I've seen him running it at the pond to get the needle setting right for the race. It was slower than you know what. I thought your kidding, but when I went to the race earlier this month to have a look. I was suprised. When these things get in rough water, the really kick it up. It was really difficult for the ski boat that had a 250hp engine in it to keep up. He finished the 12km race in about 10 minutes. I don't think personally that I will ever get involved deeper than spectating, because I couldn't fit the darn thing in my car. But at the race, the smell of straight fuel sure brought back memories of my COX .49 P-52 mustang line control plane that I had when I was a little whipper snapper.

Straight fuel??

Is that Methanol and oil but no nitro?

I'm guessing it is..

That's the stuff, the guys from Sweden, has been using the past few years.

They modify their engines to run without nitro(don't know how!)and it seems to work out just fine.

On a swedish forum, I once saw, they had a talk about the ups and downs with nitro..

They were not that convinced that nitro made their boats faster..... More realiable yes, faster????

That just what I saw.

Morten

That is right! Methanol and oil only. That's the rules.

They really have to do a lot of filing on the sleeve to get these things to scream. Some how they do. They seem to perform just as well as the nitro boats. The exhaust smells good ,too.

Straight fuel is really cheap, too. I use odonnell boat fuel in my boats. With the big Engines I use 45% nitro, and I drop about 5cc per gallon of high performance 2 cycle oil in it. With my .21 monos, I use 60%. I know that a lot of you guys back in the states use some stuff that has even higher nitro, 70 or 75 percent. I use a Rossi Rex 350 in my monos. If I use the stock carb, after I tune up the engine. It needs the high nitro to stay running, but I found if I make a spacer and slide it around the throat of a 4E O.S. Carb. and trash the stock carb, It will kick it up with lower nitro, and still keep running.

thanks Hammer