Hey you lucky guy in NC, i Missed buying that boat by 5 minutes. you bought it as i was plannibg a trip to San Diego to see my daughter and son-in-law. darn i am jealous, but congrats to you, hopefully i will find a Wing someday to add to my collection of the 3 Switzers i have now. i saw the add in propeller magazine, or it could have been hot boat too. and when i talked to the guy i think he told me he had that boat in storage for 20 years. i have a couple of pictures of that boat from it's racing days and one has Kitson fueling her up. I am also a friend of Bob switzer, he thinks i am crazy for wanting a wing, because he knows that i am going to put a couple of V-6 on her when i find her. i also am looking for a Shooting Star too. By the way there is a Switzer site on yahoo and on that site there are pictures of Bob Switzer with his new prototype Tunnel boat he may bring to market in a fewe years. My email address is [email protected]. if you would like to exchange pics of our boats. i would like to see what condition she was in when you got her. write me back and join our Switzer site. we had a get together last summer and were planning one again for this coming summer, i believe this one will be in Wisconsin, then i am hoping to host the one after that down here on the Des Plaines River just south of Chicago in 2005. Tom Arambasich.

Welcome to the site,Tom. There are a few of us here that like the old stuff. My 2 Shooting Stars are 36 and 37 years old but the restored one still turns heads on the lake and is still lots of fun.I'll try to post some pics when I get back from Orange Beach. Magicfloat

Love the old boats ! Our Supersport is a 1975 and our SK-175 is a 1977. the SK is a 2 owner boat,i bought it from the original owner in 1986 and have rebuilt her 3 times and re-powered her4 times. right now the SK has a 1994 V-6 Evinrude "SPITFIRE SERIES" V-6 on the back of her. The SS needs a lot of TLC but when she's done i think heads will turn. Now the head turner right now is our 1987 GL-21 powered by an OMC V-8. now hers the interesting part about it, the original powerhead was a 3.6 liter,a 1985 Johnson. i found this boat in the Wisconsin Dells bought it and brought it home. but she was overheating at low speeds,finally took her apart and found out there was a blown gasket where the powerhead and midsection meet, and one small item a CRACKED PISTON! wow was i disappointed. so we took the powerhead to Baker Marine Support in Antioch Illinois to get bored,and the week it should have taken to bore and return the block to me took almost all summer long because Jeff Baker Broke one of the boring bits he needed to finish the job and had to wait till a new one(s) came in on order. So during this time the guy i bought the 175 V-6 for my SK calls me from the OMC plant and says that there is a new 4 liter block up here for sale (he was buying up parts from the bankruptcy sale) put together(minus the carbs and electric) and all they wanted for it was 1800.00 plus 2 new sets of heads. so i told him to grab it and i would come up to his house and get it from him. so we played with this motor for the rest of the year, none of us really never saw a V-8 before let alone worked on one before,but Jeff Baker knows them inside out. so after we finally got this thing together we noticed that the heads didn't fit,thats when i noticed the hi performance dome racing pistons that were sticking out the back. so when we tried bored heads from a racer who still used the V-8 they fit, but when we were talking to him on the phone trying to describe the motor he was very puzzeled. i guess the OMC V-8's were all 'open deck cooling' were as the V-6's are 'closed deck cooling'.but what we say this V-8 was closed deck cooling,the race guy said we were nuts,that OMC never built a "closed deck'V-8. soooooooooo we knew that Jeff Baker was going to be in town soon so we asked him if he could please come down and take a look at what we had. about a week later,now this is at the end of October, Jeff shows up at Johnson Motors In Morris Illinois,where the work on my motors are done, walks in and looks at the engine with no heads on it and says something like"where did you get this thing at"? he said of all the engines (V-8's that is) he has worked on he has never seened a V-8 like this. he also said that there was rumor that OMC was going to build it but they discontinued the V-8 line and shortly after that went broke, so no one ever thought they actually built the thing. so he explained to me if i wanted to run the engine the way it was that i would have to have my heads bored to fit it then with the hi-performance pistons i would have to run a very hi octane fuel in her (104 AV fuel i was told). so we made a deal,he took the engine home to Antioch and he would have it working in a week but he wanted my pistons and would replace them with brand new flat heads. so i agreed and when i got the boat back, in a week, i had to break her in again,brand new never used engine. i was not impressed buy the new motor at all,as a matter of fact i was really disappointed after waiting an entire season to get her in the water. so i put the boat away for the winter and that next spring i took it back to Jeff so he could run her and see what he thought. at this time what we did not know is that one of the lock rings holding the rod to the pistons had come off and went through the system,when i saw that i was ready to give up. Jeff asked me if i had a couple of hours,he thought it was fixable because there was only a tiny scratch in the cylinder wall that he polished out in about 15 minutes,2 hours later we had her running,and all summer long that boat has been getting faster and faster. he says that according to the porting we should be pushing 325 horse power, i eventually want that tweaked to 400 if we could. anyway attached is a pic of our Gl-21 with a prototype V-8 racing engine on the back. our best guess is that the block was made in 1998 and the rest of the parts(the lower unit and mid-section) are from the 1985 original(everything else is new or special built) motor. tom Arambasich.

Easy big guy or we might have to start talking about your malfunctioning tubular epithelial sheath that surrounds the lower part of the hair shaft and encloses at the bottom a vascular papilla supplying the growing basal part of the hair with nourishment.

I love this.

T2X and SkiffnBuck......

Please save me a ride when you get those wings ready --- let me know when! Growing up only an hour from Havasu, I've been watching those fabulous boats run since I was eight years old!

Jeff -- in case you are wondering who this is - it's Boatkitten (BK). It was great to finally meet you in Madison this year. My ride in the 1948 Gar Wood Speedster "Obsession" was too cool. Did you happen to see the story in Hot Boat?

I would love to do a "Wing" story!

PS -- I found Jimbo McConnell too! He was standing beside me at a parking lot party in San Diego a couple of months ago...talk about surprised! When I saw who it was, I was speechless.

It's totally great to see Jimbo and Cathy going to boat races again!


http://www.apba-racing.com/~Photos/jimbo.jpg

BK...you're on...... Clayton, NY Antique race boat regatta...is the place....it's shaping up to be a BIG event. Kenny Kitson, Bob Switzer, John Sherlock, Jon Culver, and a host of others are supposed to be there.

Next August.....

T2x

Fabulous!

What's the date?
Hope I can make it ! Sounds like quite a reunion!


I know you two have probably seen this photo taken by my brother at the 1970 Havasu Classic (rare color pic of a triple engine Wing).


http://www.hydrostream.org/GuestArchive/Wing.htm

It is really nice to see new members with interest in the sport rather than the usual interest in whatever political/business disaster is occuring. It seems rare anymore to see someone with under 10 posts actually posting a boating related topic rather than some slanderous bs about a thread.

Anyway, I'm very good friends with Wyatt Nelson who races Formula 1 currently, so I spend a bit of time watching the races here and there and this old stuff actually does intrigue me. I think that any of you that raced back then had some serious balls. Like plane test pilots, it was certainly trial and error ( and most lessons I think were learned by error) in my judgement. "Kick the tires, light the fires" ...and hold on!

Switzer Wizzards. What is this? This was a 17 foot Switzer I bought (2nd owner) in 1978. Bright yellow with metalic green accents.

I just found a note that said your Dad's Proline location is in Fenlon Falls - is that really right? If so, this world is getting smalled all the time...that's where my cottage is! Send me an email, J.Cas!