Tricks that old racers get up to after retirement

[rckid74]

...Agreed. Got ta go original. It will cost a couple thousand or so to do it, but worth it in the end. Only way to do it, that I can think of, is to search out an original 1976 V-1750 & build the rest of Old Blue's powerhead, and the rest of a complete motor, with that. Not too hard. There are still a few out there. Some mounted on boats, that might have to be bought along with the motor, but not much choice any more. Sell off the boat, etc. Look in the freshwater states, and they will come apart to be restored, no problem. One trick though, is getting one with the first generation gearcase design. This is it...

I don't think that will work out Fugimo. Let me explain. --- OLD BLUE was never intended to be run on a boat and does not have any of the necessary mounting points for all sorts of accessories. It was designed to be run on a crankshaft dyno -- period. When running on the crankshaft dyno, all the accessory things like switch box, ignition coil, starter solenoid, fuel supply, water supply, throttle control, were ready mounted in the dyno cell and of course we didn't need a cowl. So trying to make it a runable, cowled boat engine by adding all that stuff will indeed bastardize it. The only thing bastardized about it right now (no offense meant Jackie) are the die cast cylinder heads which I had to put on it just to get it buttoned up and protected from further decay. The original sand cast heads were missing when I found the engine after many years in storage.

The only reason it's mounted on an undercarriage now is that it looked so good on the dyno, we thought it had a decent chance for production but we first needed to back up the dyno performance with some boat testing. Quickest way to do that was to somehow mount it on the inline six undercarriage. Hense what you see now. John and Jack did that boat testing with OLD BLUE at the lake in March of '72. The test results and some of John's comments about it are given in the MERC V6 HISTORY thread.