Reviving An Old Drag Boat With An LS Swap!

this is the roadkill

boat

remember one time me and friedrich went to lake elsinore we took the engine out of the truck and put it in this

boat

we sailed for two hours and then we came back and put the engine back in the truck and towed this thing to home. We just filmed another roadkill episode and when we were done we brought cousin Randy's boat up to Georgia and we're cleaning it out and putting a new ls3 in there and I think tomorrow afternoon we'll hear some noise but uh you guys are going to like this , this is the ls3 engine block, the oil support ring, the oil expander ring, the ls3 piston, all of this was in this boat as a result of the hit and run episode.

I can't wait for you to see that the cleaning is going very well. I still see some oil residue, most of the main parts are out of here oh there's another one, I guess maybe I'll also shoot on the top of the tank in case there are pieces of pistons, oh there's another piece of piston that just came out, wow, that makes sense because the hole in the block was right here, so it just threw oil behind it, just try to get rags in there because we're going to want to put carpet in here at some point and we're not going to Being able to do that if eight years later it's still leaking oil from the left side, it's not going to stick very well, no, not because of the last engine explosion, so the wiring is so covered in oil that we have to cut all the cable ties. and then just turn the wires green and then we'll apply some of that flexible wirecare technology to protect them so instead of using 8 million cable ties we'll use something a little bit cooler okay so let's talk about this motor , this is an aluminum ls3 block it has mast heads it has a single four cylinder intake valve covers rocker arms under the valve covers we don't know anything else we dynodicate it in most speed shops in the nova attempt and I think it did 700 on like a 200 shot of nitrous, what did this thing do? did 485 in the tire in a and what did it do in the bottle 7 19. 7 19 in about a 200 um injection in the rim, yeah, so you put that same injection in that powerboat and that's a legit 90 mile powerboat per hour we're going to start with a tunnel ram and two fours and I bet this boat is probably going to go 75 probably 80 miles an hour like it's going to be fun, it's going to be It's a lot of fun and then, you know, later on we can go from there thanks to the nitrous oxide, but for now I'm going to remove the parts from the car, like this Quicktime hood, and not use it when this goes in the boat.

You will only have a front and rear engine plate to mount it on the boat and then you will have a flex plate and a PTO type adapter that will adapt the rear of the crankshaft flange directly to the drive shaft to the jet drive so that We don't need any of this heavy stuff anymore, so off we go and someday maybe we'll find a replacement ls3 to put back in the assassination attempt nova, but there's a good chance the car won't run the rest of the time. year ok so this is a sfi hood housing it has a mid plate here that doesn't bolt to the vehicle at all what it does is contain the bottom half of this so you need to remove all these bolts along of the at the bottom which are 3 8 16 with a nut and a hex head bolt, you have to take them all out to separate the bell housing from the intermediate plate, the intermediate plate is behind the flywheel and clutch so it stays there, this comes off and then that gives you access to the clutch bolt okay bingo now the clutch comes off these look like eight millimeters yeah now we're bolting the motor plates to the motor and to the flex plate and then we're going to roll the boat in and install the inlet, this thing ran like a champ, how fast was it?

Seven-something there, six, sixty, son, just fifty on the eighth man all the way around the track and that's when I left it easy, that's when I took it off the line the next time. around it would have been nice if the track had held him oh that's what it was I remember the last pass was a seven-something 7-eleven was the second one it's always uh that was the last thing you do that you remember to forget all about those six seconds, eighth mile fast, I remembered the eight, the seven seconds, which is the last one you did, where it was just fun, the tires half track, that car could never be accused of easily driving the rear engine plate, or the peg has to do it. come out or do we have to trim this to fit this yes, the peg the peg was out of the other one was yes that was out of the other one?

I was like why the hell is the plug out? Now I know, yeah, let's just cut it out. He's in the band, so he's fine, so this is what's happening. This is the rear engine plate for the Renegade. The cutout for the flex plate is just a hair too small. It is, I would say, 3 16 inches in diameter too small. it doesn't want to get past the flex board, which means I had to continue before the flex board went on, but I'm not going to remove the flex board. You know, I wrench-tightened the bolts and we torqued them to spec. yada yada yada, so what I'm going to do is take these fittings off of this thing, draw a line, put it on my trusty vertical band saw and cut a new shape here and then install it nice, so here's our motor plate Oh, I won't get it back.

Soon, so I'm going to take this apart on a new welding table I have, it's strong hand tools, it's called a rhino cart, it's really great for fixing things and holding things of different shapes and sizes because it has these holes in the en the top where you can put all these accessories to hold things, you can also put a stainless steel washer through those holes that go to the motor plate and, yeah, I'm not going to fish that out later because that's that feeling of sinking. you drop something in the engine compartment and you don't hear it, it hits the ground, you found it right, we're not sinking anymore, look at all the ship analogies, sweet anyway, I'm going to plot a new pattern. here I'm going to increase this by about 3 16 inches all the way around and then I'm going to cut it on the vertical band saw and then this should continue.

Long time fans of the show will recognize this as my vertical band saw. that I got off Craigslist in North Carolina, rented a U-Haul trailer and bought it from a guy who was closing his Nascar store because he said he no longer needed these tools. He had cad or fusion 360 and just sent files. places and someone else you know did the job, I didn't need these hand tools anymore so I bought it, drugged it, took it home, put the transport trailer in my driveway and then tied a tow strap around the hitch from Blasphemy's trailer and around this and drugged. this out of that, if you haven't seen it, go back to the beginning of this channel and you can watch it now, let me demonstrate to you the incredible power of the vertical grip band saw, by the way, when cutting aluminum, it helps to lubricate the Blade, this It's the tube of Linux lubricant.

I bought it years ago, probably 10 years ago and I still have this. You can just make a bar of soap. You don't even need this. I prefer the Irish spring because you know Finnegan, but uh, whatever the Irish spring gave you. I know if you're a pigeon type, I mean, I'm not going to judge you, it works, you know, the only thing that matters is that you lubricate your blade, you don't want to clog it, you want to be able to keep going. You know there's no friction, here's another tip when you're getting close to the end and you really don't want your fingers in front of the blade, just take a piece of sacrificial wood and use it to push the piece.

I learned it from mrc fab. one of the guys that used to work there actually made this sacrificial piece of wood, that's how long they had it. See why now the blade can penetrate the wood and my fingers don't look at that precision like now. Damn Mike, if he didn't know any better, he'd say you have a plasma table or a water jet or something. No, you would be wrong. I don't have that, just good eyesight and quality tools, that's what I have, I hope. this fits the boom clearance something's going on ah this oil pan hits the bottom of the boat lift it up quick we need the engine oil pan blown up and hopefully it's not blown up or we need an oil pan overnight so I guess Tomorrow we will find out what happened to the old engine.

Hopefully the collection tube and windbreak tray haven't been completely destroyed. Yeah, I don't like this oil pan anyway. It's too small for a motorboat. Well, I think it happens for a reason. If that is. Probably what it is is like you blew up this engine with a five quart pan, you know it's direct dry, there's no transmission, so you're driving at like three four thousand rpm just cruising along and then you tone it down and there's a lot of oil. . It's on the top end of the motor that runs the dry pan, so that's okay, last night we were traveling by truck, we got our ls3 ready to go on the boat.

The weird engine plate is on the front plates of the engine, the driveshaft, like we feel good. We put it in there and it doesn't want to sit on the rails that these little feet screw into and it didn't take us long to figure out the fact that the bottom of this oil pan was sitting on the bottom. of the ship, which is not good. Ideally I would use a much larger but shallower oil pan and what I mean by this is that it would be a box style pan so it wouldn't hang as far from the sump rail. but it would have more capacity.

This is a five quart oil pan on a jet boat. It would be nice to have a 10 quart oil pan and the reason is there is no transmission so the cruising rpm on most jet boats is between three and four thousand rpm so now imagine driving at three and four thousand rpm for a minute or two at a time, maybe more and then you know you start to feel like a frog and go into a tailspin, you know well that you have pumped a lot of oil into the top end of the engine by driving it at those rpm for a while. long period of time, there isn't much left in the crankcase, so when the revs are increased bad things can happen, which is why on jet boats we traditionally use 10 to 14 quart oil pans.

We don't have access to one of those, but what we do have is another oil pan that is shallower and doesn't increase our oil capacity, but at least it doesn't touch the bottom of the boat, so let's put this here. today so we can get the engine running and then later we will put a larger aftermarket pan on it. This is just not going to happen now, unfortunately we have already filled it with oil so now we have to find something. wipe to drain all that oil, change the pans and then continue on our adventure 12 point pro tip oh god do you want a 7 16 pro tip?

Use the six point 10 millimeter on the bottom of your ls3, not the 12 point 7 16 I mean sometimes. that will work but i wouldn't rely on it always and that's pro advice so true no she was out of stock no stock that's so awesome bam it has cp pistons dude look for the weight it's been balanced yeah but dude it has cp pistons what kind of connecting rods are those this is cool idk but it's good it's not stock at all dude someone built this thing oh yeah wow if we only knew what the gaps between the rings, the oil pan is off, we take the opportunity. looking inside the engine trying to figure out what this is because we don't know the history of this engine.

We bought this used from a guy named Steve Shaw who is no longer with us. He said it was built, but we weren't. I don't know exactly what that means until now, we just took the valve covers off the entire time we had it and found the Jesus axle rockers underneath which is a great sign but we had no idea what was in there. the bottom. final, now that we have removed the pan, we have discovered that it has a nice set of CP forged pistons in there and a set of molnar connecting rods, we don't know what the ring gaps are, we don't know what the compression ratio is.

We were able to get a piston number which I emailed to the guys at CP to find out, maybe they can tell us the compression ratio we could get with a set of mastheads and those pistons, you know, we don't know. We know what the gaps are between the rings, so we don't know how far we can top it, but it's full of really good pieces, so we feel good about buying it and will do our best not to damage it. The step will be to put the new oil pump on the new wind tray, the new tray, stab it into the boat, remove the four individual ones because we have a tunnel ram and it's a motor boat.

They look cooler with tunnel ramps and obviously that tunnel. RAM will make a little more power, I don't care who you are, they are usually good for a minimum of 20 to 30 horsepower in one shotreally good single plane, so we'll do all that, I don't know if I'll start it today because we're really behind now, but we'll definitely try it. I have been calling this ls3 because I had seen a gray sensor on the side of the engine block, which goes to the reluctor wheel. which tells the computer or ignition system you are running what position the crankshaft is in now the gray connector on the side of the block usually indicates it is a late model engine with a 58x reluctor wheel the black connector usually It is an earlier model 3L block that would have a 24 tooth sprocket, however Newburn noted that although it has a cam sensor on the front timing cover, which also indicates a later model engine, it has one here at the top of the block, which would indicate an earlier model. engine, so what we assume happened here is that someone used an earlier model LS6 block I guess, but a later model crankshaft with a 58x wheel and probably put a later model timing cover on it.

You know there's nothing in stock about this, so who? you really know so is it an ls2? is it an ls3? Dude, I don't know, it's badass, that's all that matters, it's a, it's aA badass engine that's going to make it really fun to drive that Rogers powerboat. One last thing before we put the tray in, we reinstalled the wind tray that was there, it looks like it's going to clean the new pickup and before we put the tray in we want to check the depth between the pickup and the bottom of the tray um that's critical, OK, if there is too big a gap between this and the bottom of the pan at low oil levels, it can suck in air and cavitate the oil. pump if it bottoms out in the pan you may not pick up oil because you need to pick it up right here so what you're looking for is about a quarter inch of air space.

I do not like to run. more than that, so what we're going to do is use this square and we're going to go out the crankcase rail with the gasket up to this point here and then we can measure from our new oil pan rail here to the bottom of the crankcase, the difference in measurements is our air gap on the crankcase rail, now that's basically square okay there you go so now if I turn it the other way put it on our oil pan rail , this should no longer be like this. more than a quarter of an inch from the bottom of the sump area, so let's go over there and measure that this part that's furthest from the pan rail is still an eighth of an inch from the bottom of the oil pan, which is angled.

So as you move around, this is outside the tray with a lot of free space, so I call it okay, now we can screw our tray on. Awesome, we have a lot of free space, I mean this is great, oh look at all the free space, now move on. leave it down boom now we have a

swap

ped ls rogers bonneville tr you have to like it's official tell me about all this other lingo I just call him roger you have to say oh you have a school wheel everything else is fine so I'll give you a little history .

I don't know if there is another Rogers Bonneville TR that has been traded in. Maybe there is. I'm not aware of all the things, but factory. What was in this? Okay so this is a 76. bonneville tr came out I think in 74 and your options would have been 460 ford 454 chevy at that time they might have still been making 455 oldsmobiles not sure but the story of this guy named roger wyman, His father was manufacturing powerboats in 69 and early 70s. He and his son argued about what I don't know and his son decided to start his own company, so Wyman Custom Boats came about and later became Rogers Custom Boats.

Rogers was his son. Roger Wyman, his father. I stopped making boats pretty early on, like I think in '70 or '71, and then Roger comes out with a boat called the Cyclone, which is the boat my parents bought new in '71. So it's a boat that I spent 30 years sailing on. and wow! an 18 foot long V bottom boat so it was shorter than this one and had a deeper V and it was like a little stunt boat like it wasn't fast but the guy cornered it like you wouldn't believe it , yes, and then the super cyclone occurred. which was a stretched version of that original V bottom, it had a flat deck and was about a foot longer and then he made the bonneville, which is this boat here with this thing called a bubble deck, it's got a bubble right there, like this He made the Bonneville, which has an 18 foot long V bottom that had the super cyclone bottom I think, but a bubble deck, which is a completely new style that he copied from the Sanger boats, then he made the Bonneville tr, which is a 19 foot version of the bubble deck and it has these dropped chinos right here and i don't know if tr means tunnel runner or what but this is what a tr has and none of the other rogers boats really have it, so he made like a 20 foot day cruiser that had the same type of deck as this one, it had a bubble deck, then he made a 21 foot day cruiser, but this one was like this boat was a rocket ship.

I have been 116 in a bonneville tr with a big block blown up by a bull. chevy, which I don't recommend doing, these boats have had records in circle boat racing,

drag

boat racing like these, they were in the past and are now quite outdated, like there are numerous hull designs that are possibly better than this one, however. I will maintain that one of these configured with high power will absolutely outgun most other jet boats out there, actually yes there are only a couple, I think they would have outgunned this thing as a cp which is a performance hull California, um, but These work great, you don't want to go 120 miles an hour in one because it's a V-bottom boat and they're just not stable, they do this, but the whole race at 100 miles an hour, dude, good boat and with this engine.

On naturally aspirated this thing should top 80 probably 85 and on nitrous 100 is easy on one of these so I just need a couple of rod holders and you know a fish finder and I'm ready to go, yes, you practically can. Go fish here real quick, okay we have tools, I'll tighten the feet and then we can remove the inlet, put the tunnel ram on, connect the water hoses and wiring, put the heads on and it'll be ready to go. The best thing about jet boats is that you only need half an hour to gut one, it only takes an hour or two to get it running again, so we're good, so these are masked motorsports black label rectangular port heads, you need a little bit of um wow.

These are CNC ported, man, really yes, they are beautiful, absolutely beautiful, oh my goodness, yes, yes, I need an Allen wrench to take them out. Wow, he has bolts in his head too. Damn, she's mean, she's really mean, so we spent a short period of time with you. Getting used to driving it and then it needs spraying. It would almost be a shame not to spray this when you have this engine here. We place the diverter nozzle on a timer. We put the sprayer on a timer. We take the complete shot. perfect where as soon as it comes out of the hole the nitrous comes on bang dude you go and then you go smooth we are about to install a Holley tall ram to replace that Edelbrock four barrel single intake because it looks cooler.

Bigger yb will also work better, but here are a couple of tips. The tall ram comes with these bolts. You must be careful when installing them. There are two threads of different lengths. Here the short side must enter the stock. However, you still need it. You have to be careful because not all the holes in the heads are blind on this particular set of heads. These are headers with black masked labels in the corner, so the front passenger side corner is not blind. The driver's side rear corner is not blind. Why do we care so much? the stud goes into a blind hole right there, it should go that far when you go here, it will go that far if you install the long side of the stud here and accidentally screw it in too far, you can stick this in. a push rod that will bend it, scrape it and send metal into the oil, don't ask me why, but apparently I've done it before, with the very short thread side down and be careful how far you screw it in, there's the tip and also use a tunnel. ram because more power is guaranteed I saw it in the engine masters.

Okay, I'm a fan of the black valve covers because they match the carburetors. I think all the hardware on this boat should be black like the rail kit, the motor plates like everything that's so cool, oh man I love helium okay what's in here? I don't remember, try the ignition, oh I think it might have been the bilge pup, let's see, come on baby, pick up some fuel, okay, wait, it's closed, it's closed. It's hard to pick up fuel, especially when the double support is okay, try it now, oh oh oh, there we go, so the big bowl, these bowls here, no, it's not in the middle, I don't even see it, it's high or Too low, okay? that's too high, these two are low, yeah, those are too high and these are too low now we're almost at eight psi, go ahead and shoot, uh, what's going on here?

Yes, pick it up and press the home button, try again, okay, done. let's just remove this as a timing light and it comes on it's like wait now I'm ready to go uh it falls off I don't know what to do with it well we can pull a valve cover and see if there's oil okay this is where we are , we made a video on getting the Renegade Rogers jet boat home to Georgia and then we pulled out the blown up twin turbo ls3, installed the engine from the newborn assassination attempt, Nova, which is no longer with us. r.i.p. moment of silence, okay, we move on and then, um, when we started the engine on this boat, it was really unhappy, it had very low oil pressure and we're pretty sure it's a problem between our oil pump and the crankcase pickup. from the oil pump, that's a lot of peas.

Let's fix that problem right here now. We have ordered a larger capacity oil pan. It is nothing like most oil pans for an ls engine because it is a full length pan. It won't fit in a car, however it should fit in ours. motorboat and give us not four or five or six or seven quarts of capacity, this will give us 10 quarts of capacity, which is good in a motorboat and here's why that motorboat does not have a transmission, which means that the speed cruise and the cruising rpm is really high 30 miles per hour on that boat is about 2500 rpm so you can imagine if you're cruising all day at, say, 4000 rpm and suddenly you decide to hit the throttle with a bowl of 5 quarts, there's not much, there's not much oil left in that crankcase when you do that and it's a good way to blow up your engine.

This new 10-quart oil pan came from the guys at Socal Jetboat speech shop and we'll be installing it on an upcoming episode of Finnegan. garage so you can finally see the renegade traverse my local lake thanks for watching