Rossman

AZMIDLYF

I know...just bustin' your balls.

Fair Chase

Hi Ross, don't want to hi-jack either. BUT.... I see you live right near Skater. I need to haul my tilt to Skater "before winter hits"

My wife and I were there to order our 368 January 28th which was when the Polar Vortex storm came through. Being from Arizona, I don't wish to repeat that kind of weather or even the chance of that type of weather. So, what would you recommend as the "latest" time frame?

Thank you.

Steve

Rossman

Very hard to say. I’ve gone boating in November on the big lake a few years ago in my old velocity. I have also been snowmobiling in October. Very unpredictable. I think with these weak winters lately you’d be able to come grab it in November yet.

Fair Chase

Thanks Ross.

hotrodford

this boat run yet ? as in by now??

Cig41

BigSilverCat

Ok, its not ending, I'm back. I have been busy working on the old race boat and the new race boat which has taken a lot of my time and money so I did not have the time to work on the Diesel boat, I started to put updates on here but just kept thinking I would wait a week and work on it and put something on here and just kept waiting till I was going to do some real work on it and that is finally this week.

Last year at Skaterfest I took the diesel boat and the first day the transmission cooler broke. It was a weld where they welded a threaded bung to the housing instead of the push-on hose with clamp on the custom coolers I had made. I had no way to fix it so I used safety wire to pull the fitting toward the cooler enough that the bilge pump would keep up. The next day I took it out to do the first run and the weld on the turbo where industrial welded a v-band flange to the front of the turbo to change it to a v-band instead of hose and clamp broke. I took the turbo out and found a guy that had a tig welder he would let me use and I put a lot more weld on it. It looked like the flange was just fused on with no filler metal just a tiny bit of burn in. I added several sticks of filler metal and made a big weld that will never break. Put the turbo back in and when I ran it again a weld on the exhaust pipe broke. I took it out and went and welded it too. It looked the same, a pretty weld that was less then halfway penetrated through the thickness of the metal, looked like it had no filler metal just butt joint fused together. I welded the butt joint back together making sure it melted all the way through the inside and then ground down the weld on the outside and put a 1" wide sleeve over the weld and welded each side. Put the exhaust back in and went out again and ran it up to 110 mph and I guess the water pressure was too high for my safety wire to hold the transmission cooler fitting together and it came completely apart and was filling the engine compartment faster the the bilge pump could keep up and sinking the boat so I decided to go back and park it and ride with someone else on the run.

A few days later I loaded it up and took it back over to skater and planed on washing the boat the next week since it had a scum line on the side from sitting in the water for a few days at Skaterfest. Well I did not ever wash it and a few months later I decided to clean the scum line off thinking it was going to be a lot of work to get off since it had sat for so long and I wiped it with a dry towel and it wiped right off. I did not have to use cleaner at all, I did end up getting the towel damp with water to pick up the dust but with no scrubbing the scum line came right off. So I will recommend getting ceramic coatings on the boats.

I have ran the boat a few times since and I'm sending more pics and videos from my phone to the computer and I will put some more updates this week. I have taken a lot of the piping out and I'm going over all the welds and will start testing the boat again in the next few weeks. If I can get the welds to hold I will start trying to do some short distance runs of a few hundred miles to see if the engines will hold up.

dunnitagain

Lots of Welders out there .... but not many Weldors if you know what I mean.
Ive seen lots of pretty welds but most are not sound , hate you had to keep repairing everyone elses work.
Boat is Awesome , staying tuned.

Baja Rooster

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