I've been following your posts, your work is coming out great. Keep on posting pictures with the narrative.
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I've been following your posts, your work is coming out great. Keep on posting pictures with the narrative.
I will be getting back here, the past month was nuts. Between a low level of customer work, I am retired now so it is specialty favor tasks, My toys, this project but my wife and I host aviation events, most all were rained out this year but damned if we loose our fall fly-in breakfast, we need that financially and I'll be damned if we loose all our youth events this year due to weather, heck the rain dates were all rained out.
This boat project is outdoors, under a very good canopy but it has it's limits.
Over the past month I did a full day road trip to collect an L92 engine, this being a Cadillac, and many other L92, 6.2L truck engine. This is a full aluminum block/heads, 403 rated HP. I got it with the full engine harness as I requested. Very nice kit for $2300.
Within two days I had the aluminum Fidenza flywheel, intended for a C5 Corvette with a Mercruiser flexplate. All this combination is the lightest and most efficient I can muster up with my financial limits.
As of today I did allot of development work on this project by setting the engine in place and now the engine with a huge bundle of wires lumped on it is back indoors for me to splice a few hundred wires.
I also will design, and machine, fabricate all the water cooling system, the commercially available ones I do not consider suitable for cold weather operation. So I will build my own water system with a more suitable thermostat operation utilizing the single crank driven pump.
Another aspect I am stumbling on, It was my intention to build long tube headers, stainless EX tubes with aluminum outer jackets. Turns out over the recent years the suppliers I work with have all lost their sources for formed tube and what little they can source are stupid money.
I am not sure I can source stainless and aluminum in the same bend radius. Even Burns is offering very little now.
Heck I might be forced to settle for Chinese cast EX manifolds if I can even find anything decent in Aluminum for less money than my full project cost will be.
More later.
Is this a "closed" cooling system? I‘m not sure you can run an aluminum car motor very long without anti-freeze to prevent corrosion?
This is an open cooling system. For the 5 to 10 days a year this will be on fresh water there will be no issue. In the world of road racing we can not use any additives in our cooling systems and have never seen any issue in the near 50 years I have been working and running.
Have you had any problem with old outboards? I mean older than you are. They were crude alloys and are still running. The aluminum used in engine blocks and heads have rather high silicone content as well as many other alloys. If you look at the photos of my engine you will see the outside of this engine lived in salt water, it is from the streets in the winter, you must have never heard about this.
Lake water will not and can not rot out an engine.
I'm impressed your still working on your project. Like you, life just keeps happening, my project hasn't been touch at all this year short of pulling the seats out. I look at it as I walk past it.
and yes, as you said with cooling, my all aluminum outboards seem to do just fine with lake water cooling them.
Different alloys and cooling system designs specifically for that reason, but go on with your bs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Poky
Also, most people running aluminum engines on racetracks are using deionized water and something like Redline's Watter Wetter to avoid corrosion issues.
I will be getting back to posting on this project.
Allot of external work has has been done on the engine, I spent a few hundred hours + trimming and splicing the factory wire harness. The harness included the full environmental system as well a transmission and transfer case control. Heck all wheel speed sensors went into this. I have taken about 300 photos and need to pick what will present this the best.
for the wiring, I thinking that is way better to go with a aftermarket engine control system. there is just some much there as you pointed out that you just don't need. and then to dig thru the HP software and all the things you need to shut off is just a pain. Its much easier and a better used of time to just buy a system that just controls the engine and send out basic out put signals. I think its the one spot that I can justifies spending the way extra money.
No, I have no interest in the aftermarket wire harnesses, they are made for cars, not boats. Their harness will not allow the ECM to be where it will be in my hull. They still feel the need to useless stuff like radiator fans. Most of those harness are all made for automatic transmissions.
Just because you are incapable of this work does not make it difficult for me. It is just going on 54 years I have been building custom wire harnesses. These have been for industrial machine control, aircraft and automotive as well as wiring houses.
Wiring is the easy stuff. Just time consuming.
The only issue with the gen4 oem controllers is the canbus is looking for a lot of feeds from all systems in order to operate properly. It sounds as if you have this figured especially with the vss feeds being worked into your rig. What camshaft are you running?
I have two guys who have a reflash that takes the complexities away. Basically make it a simple system yet keeps the fine control that is available within the system.
Good chance I am wrong too.
I overlooked the camshaft question, I am starting with the original cam. Once I have data and a feel for this package I will determine if any change needs to be made. This is an L92, this does not have modular displacement as the L94 and later engines have.
Everywhere I post this I am told I must change the cam, I look at specs and the suggested cams look to be for more top end power. Pretty useless when this is expected to cruise 80+ at 4K revs. This from the owner of the yellow surf drive conversion who says his boat pulled through 100 very quick and ran 120 once, and only once, he had a few hundred more ponies than I will.
Being retired from my 53+ years of custom fabrication work in Aviation and Road race cars I have allot more time available although I am on a limited budget I was finding nice alloy marine exhaust would cost me more than the boat, the surface drive and engine together.
I also find these days most all of my resources for a wide selection of tube in a wide variety of bend radius such that I can match the inner and outer tubes especially where I wanted STL inner and Aluminum outer.
So I chose to buy these $100 Chinese street rod headers for the base to build from.
Turns out they are impressively well made.
Once the WX allows me to get the driveline sitting in the hull again I will build the through hull elbows and fit the inner risers.
This opens up many hours more work.
Humm the image host I have been using has changed their interface, I need to relearn how to get my images here.
I figured out the changes to getting the images up here, I think a big part of the issue is my aging. And well trying to live with Long Covid eating my brain.
A short bit ago I wrote about my image site issues, but no. I have been using Imgur for many years and in recent months I can not log in. Late last year I got a warning of low memory so I deleted a few hundred images, yet recently I can not log on their site, just a black screen.
I am making headway, recently starting on building the hull wire harness, nothing special other than the 7 wires for the throttle pedal. That cable is on the kitchen table. With WX coming in it will be an indoor day so some shopping uptown and play with wires.
I need to find a different Image host as well.