Riding (And Almost Sinking?) @Finnegan's Garage Twin Turbo Jet Drag Boat!

I don't want to alarm you, but we're

sinking

and we're out of gas, okay guys, we're here at Georgia Finnegan's shop, we're going to take a look at the caddy who just came back, yeah, take a look at him. the

turbo

boat

i've only ever seen online and maybe go to the lake a bit yeah this is a jet

boat

on steroids i have a jet boat up north with a big black chevy and they've been huh run and i have to do uh rooster tails it does a pretty awesome job and then you can go extreme the other way mine will do about 100 miles an hour not sure it will do much more than that i am sure and i do it with a lot more styling so obviously it has a sunnies sonny's hemi on it

twin

would you say these are 85mm

turbo

s i think so what's running on racing gas at least it was when we were able to get it um you could probably run it on gas pump because it only puts out nine pounds of boost right now but um according to the fu the flow numbers think it does 1700 right now honestly I don't know I only stabbed it for five seconds so I don't even know how fast it is but 1700 with the 4000 capacity if you have to yeah if you had yeah I don't know what I would do with these turbos but yeah I think You could probably do 4,000, but why would you be on a ship like this like there's no good reason to? the water comes out much faster yeah yeah I don't know how much this could handle if you go beyond what you are right now so yeah if you're already breaking things as they are then yeah certain parts of the jet propellant would outlive other parts, wouldn't we need some of that good billet Australian stuff?

Pray that nobody interrupts you on the way because you are not detained. There are no breaks. Absolutely no breaks. There's no seat belt, I wear a life jacket that has a parachute built into it, I mean good kevlar shorts like there's a lot of reasons not to do this, but it's also a lot of fun. the tanks are

almost

full yeah oh ok we're going for them today so we call these boats jets that's a bit of a misnomer actually there's no jet engine on this boat obviously tom told them Which has a 711 cubic inch Chevy Hemi Sunnies. but this is a jet propellant and what you can think of this is kind of like a trench pump the berkeley jet boat the berkeley jet propulsion company in the 60's started putting them on boats and everything what it is is a hole down here where the water enters the bottom of the boat and then we could probably turn it around and reposition it so this here screws into the bottom of the boat it has a hole right there the water enters down the bottom of the boat into what's called the bowl inside here is an impeller that looks like l Like a propeller, but it's wrapped, the water is squeezed through this bowl, out of this adjustable nozzle and essentially what does is push the boat through the water and these are famous for operating in shallow water they are very safe but if you operated this boat let's say in two feet of water it would pick up whatever is on the bottom of the lake and throw it here for the boat to suck the water and then eject it out the back so if you take one of these adjustable nozzles and point it up you'll see a nice rooster tail go well if you exaggerate that and point straight up in the air the boat would just go ahead this water coming out doesn't have to hit anything to push the boat forward because the boat is pushing itself forward so this is the basics of how a jet booster works.

It is directly coupled to the engine. There is no transmission. There is no overdrive. There is no gearbox on this boat. rutal acceleration the downside of that is if the engine stalls the jet prop stops turning and even though you are moving at a high speed all that water still goes into the jet prop and when the jet prop stops to move, water has no place. to go and what happens in the worst case is the back of the boat goes up in the air the front of the boat goes under you're swimming at a high speed that's why we're all a safety team like the shorts kevlar and the parachute and my life jacket and all that kind of stuff, so, um, this is really, does it hurt?

No, oh no, thank God, my personal opinion is that all this can be avoided. stupid stuff, it's the reason I don't drive other people's boats because if a wire fails in the ignition system you go swimming you know if you don't read the water correctly and hit a wave that's going too fast. going swimming and going s swimming sucks because usually you're going to get thrown over the side of that fiberglass hole you're not just going to get spit clean up in the air and you know it's a bad deal I try to avoid it I've never been Happened to me and I hope it never does, but again I think if you set everything up correctly, use good parts, you should be fine, so we have three bolts that are stuck on the bottom of the drive plate.

I'm going to weld some quarter inch nuts to the bottom of them we already broke three pieces trying to get them off so I'm going to weld some nuts on the bottom and use a 7 16 wrench to get them off right now I'm just trying to get everything ready , so I will not burn small holes in the pot or sparks in the pot. There are also airbags in the rear of this trailer for air travel. I'm going to block them because it's something to land on my airbag and blow up my face. I prefer not to have that.

Yeah you normally don't have to use a soldering iron to take your boat apart but when if you don't put enough anti seize on the bolts they tend to get stuck on the aluminum parts ok that's what cotton was supposed to do yeah , it's definitely the cotton's fault because he's not here that's always caught in this fall, I think he's a Fool if he rides in it no, it'll be good, it'll be good, I think driving one of these is a lot different than driving a car With windshields and seat belts so you don't have to go too fast to get scared. no one in the passenger seat but he's the calmest person i've ever met i mean even if you watch the video of him in a car that's on fire that guy didn't panic you know there was a little moment when I don't know, Hans's device on his belt hung up and he was.

You know he was ready to go, but he couldn't go. There's a little moment where you see him pick up the pace, but you never see Tom. bailey either panics or actually shows any emotion i'm pretty sure he's dead inside so i don't think this is going to happen i think if you put a gop ro in his hands it might look like he's clenching you know yeah yeah yeah I think he'll smile but I think that's it yeah excuse me okay you can grab it by the shaft here if that helps you so this engine was built by the nice folks at Sunny Leonard Racing Engines and um he he was one of the few people crazy enough to say yes let's put a 711 cubic inch turbo engine in a jet boat and uh super cool guy sadly not with us anymore but the engine has been awesome we built it runs a long time it has steel rods so we don't take it apart very often it's over built for what we're doing like it doesn't need such a big motor but um i had sold the last

drag

a motor combo and trimmed my coupons and now i got some money and i went i want one of yours i want a big block chevy with five inch clearance and when you go five inch spore clearance like tom knows um everything gets bigger you know its you i know i didnt need a 7 -eleven, but five inch clearance heads require large valves.

Big valves require a big cylinder. Big cylinder means big pistons because it's a turbo. I wanted a lot of run on it, a lot of swept volume to get it to roll up fast. it was about 130 and ran low sevens in the fourth to this animal I've only stayed on the throttle for about five seconds huh and right here at my local lake it's been a

drag

track so I have no idea how fast the thing is i know it catches my eye oh and that's a hemi head it's a big block yeah so it's a brodex block that's a big block chevy yeah but with a bigger hole spacing and then it's sunny cast aluminum hemi heads and it's got a sunny bright cp crankshaft carrillo pistons precision turbos rods holley efi dominator system is running all fuel on ignition and data logging and then this is a tom peterson placecraft room has 19 feet long the whole vacuum is 420lbs so the power to weight ratio of this is ridiculous like lik e uh yeah when you hit it it'll catch you in the seat and you don't have tires so we don't have traction or anything , so As you know, with a good jet booster that is very well built, throttle is instant. start moving there's no tire spin you know so it's a lot of fun I really like cars but this is where it is and you open the diversion to roll it up or so let's talk about it so remember I said it's direct drive there's no trans so it doesn't have brakes and it doesn't necessarily have reverse depending on how it's set up but this jet has what's called a place bypass nozzle it's adjustable up and down so it I can trim the attitude to the boat as it goes through the water this also opens and closes and gives you neutral then forward so when it's in neutral the water is redirected to the sides so I can sit here like if i had a clutch and wind up. is that so mine actually goes in reverse yeah when you go down that's right I can take this off and put a different one here and have reverse but I don't know I don't really care about reverse I just like to go out with momentum and so, it's much more fun to have this. here how i can i can rev it up to around 3500 it will stay locked into that and then when you go out to 3500 it won't do any boost unless you're in two steps but at 3500 it will go from zero to nine pounds so and uh and it's fun it's really fun so that's your brake trans because it flips and there you go yeah that's literally you got a throttle and some buttons and switches on the steering wheel and so it revs it up and then it just flip the switch the co2 opens that up and then about 1.2 seconds into the race the ecu tells this to get co2 to lift that up to its race height and then it's in reverse forward it goes up and down ok the pop-off shouldn't have changed, but go ahead and turn it blue, one always stays there, come on and then close it, hey. we put it together good sweet yeah come on baby or not i need to prime it again ok let's try toms ok idea here let's find a second one that isn't coming out of the turbos We are getting something.

I wonder if that. it didn't get it to start, it just wanted to do it for a second, was it ready? he freaked me out once he said something about oil pressure i was like oh god we put it on i just said where is there we go how is that for service look at that so you ain't got nothing to hold on to i can put a hand on there but there is no grab handle, no you won't need it. i want you to feel the same, yeah it's ok we'll be fine we'll go out and sail around b Because it's going to take a while to warm him up and then we'll burp him a few times and see if he's happy.

Usually I'm the one in control of making someone scare someone. I'm a bad parent, I'm usually not on the receipt, the recipient's seat sees and I wouldn't do this, you know, not because I don't trust me, but because I don't trust anyone else on the planet like I do, literally. I'm a bad passenger I won't but uh but I promise we will I won't put you in danger we'll be good because I want to live and I want to see you live and you know we'll do other things that are less profound okay but right now there's also leaks at its peak because all that is new in the back. silicone so oh ah so no huh right now the rain feels like rocks i'm

almost

thinking oh yeah i know which bolt i grabbed but i said i couldn't find the bolts to hold the jet drive on each one they were too much long but I was going blind without looking they all tightened up they put different bolts in but they weren't long enough so they tightened up but then they tightened all the way down so there's a little bit of water coming in so get some bolts different, squeeze it and yeah look at that one right there oh god it's alright yeah no no no no come on grandpa I'll help you in it's not the age it's all about accommodation here nothing. but the best, let's be real, we don't want you to scratch the boat, well let's be real too, you're a little fat and we're a little worried about the fiberglass, it's thin, you want to see something crazy though, right? rolling look at this oh wow you can't walk on the boat that's how it weighs 420lbs the bottom is thick and really stiff but anywhere else you don't really need any weight that's just i don't know maybe an eighth of an inch thick right there, you can just push your finger through it so there's no breakdancing. hereup tom jeez thanks so hmm right we literally ran out of gas it will prime with the other one oh probably not normally we rip a tool we carry a tool bag here with the tools to prime it oh yeah they're in the back of the truck yeah It was full but we ran the boat last year I don't want to alarm you but we're

sinking

and we're out of gas we've got a bilge pump and a pretty good battery okay I'm going to turn this pump on to see if we can get pressure made out of fuel.

Change the return lines there too. Yes, I can reach everything. I hope I don't burn. Tank up and let's see if we can huh hopefully that one will prime so we'll update you shortly Luke says just keep reco Working drama now we got an episode stuck in the lake at night now we got an episode okay come on baby prime you gotta hit it there you go what were we lucky it ran out of gas i don't see how you did through the whole tank i don't think it was actually great how i saw it i saw it in the spout thats ok somethings going on lost prime and water is pouring into the boat from the transom afterwards so on this side of the boat about half the suction casing that width just a stream of water coming out that's what I do all good still You haven't told me who had to swim, so I wasn't too worried so far.

I told him he was like dammit he was like he wasn't swimming it's too cold ok I didn't put a little kayak in there you can take it out there you could have towed us he was back how can I change tanks without melting in the headers ? i did it i managed to get it right i think mike messed up my boat i had a nice jet boat at home and it was a lot of fun and then i j i just found out theres more fun and i think i guess im the bracket racer of the group now, well we were just talking about this.

I know Tom, you know him very well and he always struck me as the type of guy that if he got into one of these he would be like oh okay I can have a lot more fun in one of these than in my current book, not that there's nothing. wrong with your current book it's not just slow it sucks but you know stamina week is awesome because stamina week is a drag race with a lot of other fun elements that go into it you know the road trip and the people and everything that and these kind of boats are really great for hosting drag boat races but where the fun is really going to the Colorado river and driving a boat like this to a sandbar to hang out with all the people and then street racing in the water so i feel like we both need to go west we need to find him a boat and d then we need to head west again and go have fun on the river in that boat which is in the next episode yeah so i got a question for you, maybe fast forward a couple of years, i have a question for you, were you more scared when we ran? out of gas and we were sinking or during the driving part of this deal I don't know like I said the part where we ran out of gas I mean you still hadn't explained who had to go get help so please so i wasn't scared yet i hadn't told you that you'd be the one to swim back to shore and how long the battery could keep the bilge pump running i guess what's the other problem it's a small battery a little bit i dragged myself back to change the gas tanks and I just saw this stream of water coming out of the pieces that we siliconed in the back of the boat today while we, you know, went to lunch and I said oh we're sinking no said newburn you better start to rowing with the dog oh god that battery ain't big enough to float us all the way back to shore so loo k when they launched from here i swear i'll say tom was just trying reaching for something I was ready to grab something when they left here I warned them that was going to happen but when we came back here and stood on it for a while that's when I saw it go I was like there really was nothing to hold on to you, but do that if it makes you feel better. my hand under that was uh you were reaching for something well that's the thing because that's when it's sitting there reeling or whatever and that's the cool part because my boat won't do it you just have a direct cast or whatever you can Don't mess it up or prepare anything and then apply full energy.

It's automatically gradual as far as here. It's like you are. it's like the hairs are standing up on the back of your neck saying oh god here it goes thanks for watching yeah please like and subscribe so you can