*twitch*

What a chaotic last few weeks I have had. Finally a day off, I had hoped to be able to sleep in and everything was going fine with that, then the phone rang. The horses were out and trucking up the road, so of course someone had to go get them. At least I got SOME sleep, and a nice little walk too. Yay for horses...

The last few weeks I have been getting some race boats ready, my own and another one. Mine was going fairly well, tore the engine down and replaced the cylinder sleeves and checked some things out. Had the heads fitted for the valves, making sure I had nice clean seals. Got ready to put the pistons and rods back in, only to find out that one of the connecting rods was cracked from the journal all the way down to the bearing. Not good. And of course there aren't any in this country, so somewhere in Finland there is a bunch of those particular rods, just waiting for me. Needless to say I didn't have time to get one, so I missed the first race. So my efforts went to the other boat. Last year that boat had 900+ horses in it and went 53.4 mph. But one guy owned the engine and another owned the boat. After last years racing they had a falling out, so the engine guy took his engine and the boat guy took his boat. Well we got ahold of the boat and we had an engine so we put it in. Also had to get a transmission for it. I had to put in a new rudder. Brand new electrical, remount the steering pump and redo the steering ram assembly. New exhaust was created for the engine since what was put in was an inline 6 cylinder instead of the huge V8 that was there previously. New engine mounts had to be cantilevered in and the deck reworked to get rid of the huge hole where the engine was. Launched the boat Thursday morning and didn't get it running until that afternoon. Finished the electrical up Friday and took it for a test run, only to find out that the intercooler wasn't filling like it should have. So back to the dock we went and I installed a electric pump just for the intercooler. It pumps 1350 gallons in an hour. That seemed to do the trick, I really didn't want to replumb the engine again to accomidate the intercooler, this way it was easier on me and gives the coolest effect possible for the air charge. The two speed transmission seems to work alright, but the propeller is a bit much for the lower ratio. The engine is fairly stock, some modifications are there. Larger turbo and injectors mainly, intercoolers were about the same. Haven't even had a chance to really work with the injection pump.

Took the boat down to the race in the fog, about 60 miles give or take down the coast with gray all around. Wasn't that great, but there was no major wind or wave action, so yay. I got first place in the race with it, even though it wasn't my boat. It was pretty bad for the guy I raced, we lined up with the flag boat and they were waving me to speed up, so I did only to start pulling away from them, so I pulled the throttle back a bit. Well at that point they dropped the flag. So I just jammed the throttle forward and the 2:1 ratio in the gearbox dug in and we were off, no turbo lag or anything. It was like a race between a greyhound and a bulldog. I had never raced this guy before, so I didn't really pay attention to how fast he was, and of course not knowing this I gave it everything it had. I shifted to the 1.5:1 ratio and we beat him pretty badly, at least 7 boat lengths. So yay for that. On the way home, we were crusing about 30 mph, I got about ten minutes away from docking and all of a sudden we lost power and the engine stopped. Great, just great. Out of fuel. The bow comes up so much that all the fuel races to the back of the tank, away from the pickup. So eventhough there is still fuel in the tank, there is no fuel in the engine. Got that back up and running, bled all the air out of the system and started going, doing about 20 mph, just trying to keep the bow down. Went for about a mile and a half then again, ran out of fuel. This happened about four times, I was able to pull it back and keep the engine running twice. Each time it ran dry I had to slow down, more and more and more. At the last of it I was only spinning 1000 rpm, just a high idle. Seemed like it took forever. What should have been ten minutes dragged on for 45. Talk about an anti-climax to an otherwise good evening.

The night before while down to the race we got in about 7:30 PM, I dropped my stuff off in the room and talked with some friends for a while. When we tried to go get some food at 8:50 we went to the resturant and waited by the door, to be seated. I noticed that the specials board had been wiped clean. Hmmm... not good. Sure enough when the girl said "can I help you?" and we said "yeah, how about a table?" we were informed that they had stopped sitting people at 8:30. Now you would have thought that since they just opened for the season, and we were participating in the big event for that town, that they would sit us down, or at least stay open past 8:30 on a Friday night. But no. We went to the lobby and asked where there were some places to get some food and to call up a taxi. Well the taxi said it was 15 mintues away and we got the name of a place for some grub. So we went around and talked with some of the other racers. Wandering up to where the taxi should be we waited and waited and waited. About 30 minutes instead of 15 the taxi showed up. We got in and zipped around town to the place to eat. We went in, got seated and waited and waited and waited for some service. Finally getting our orders in and we waited and waited for food. We finally got out of there at about 10:30 or so. From there we went next door to the bar and proceeded to do our thing there. I of course got carded because I look about 17. Talked with some more friends that I hadn't seen in a long time and I enjoyed myself for the most part. We left the bar a little after midnight and we piled onto a boat to go across the harbor to where the hotel was. Having to scale a fence and open the electric gate from the otherside to get people boarded too. Nice little boat ride in the dark, until we were backing down to the float. Evidently he thought we weren't as close as we were or something, and WHAMMO we hit the dock with the back corner of the boat doing about 6 knots or so (8 knots is 9 mph just so that you know) well all the floats down the line shook from the impact and the lighting and electrical services all went "boing-oing-oing-oing" waving back and forth, it was quite funny. After getting back to the room I pretty much crashed, going straight out for two months sucks ass. So that is basicly it. Lots of cute girls around and good friends. Even though I didn't have the freedom of my own boat, and having to babysit the guy whos boat we did take, it wasn't that bad.

Yeppie yahoo

Next race is in two weeks, hopefully I'll have my connecting rod this thursday or sooner

Oh, and the boat now has 250 hp and goes 36.5 officially. Maybe I'll turn it up some. Only having a third of the horsepower and only losing 18 mph? I don't think that is bad at all.


posted by Suicide at 9:43 AM