its the hot set up for chevy cars, why not boats. i want the water to enter the engine via the heads and exit where the crossover would normally go? anyone doing this? seems like a good way to fight detonation. chevrolet increased compression on the car engines after doing this, 20 years after smokey yunick told they to...thx, for sharing,ratman

Main issue in boats is getting the water warm enough before it hits the heads. You have an endless supply of cool water. Race cars are trying to take the coolest water they can get to the heads first then the block.

Only time it might be a consideration on a boat would be in a closed cooling setup IMO

ttt, anybody else got an opinion on this? how cold is to cold for water to be plumbed into the heads? the warm water on the cylinders will make the rings seal better with less distortion in the block. getting the head away from the heads should brevent detonation and allow the use of high compression ratio!

I do not see working in an open cooling system. With the water coming in the top & going out the front engine may never fill up. Thus air gaps & hot spots in and around the heads. Same as plumbing an intercooler you want to put water in the lowest port & let it come out the highest.

so NOBODY has tried??? you gotta be chitin me...

why try it when there is an endless supply of cold ( 70 to 90 degree vs 180-220 degree in an auto) water in a boat engine and with thermostat set at like 143 degrees they already run 40 to 50 degrees cooler than an auto so why goto some weird setup to gain 4-5 degrees, you could accomplish the same by going to a cooler thermostat or using a crossover. (crossovers usually run to cold unless your making big power like SC applications)

and btw Merc mpi engines run 160 degree stats because at 143 the heads are so cold the fuel doesn't vapourize well.

I have run 10.5-1 in a BBC with iron heads in my boat on shell 93 octane. It's really not about compression as much as it is about airflow.

I rebuilt my motor with better porting and bowl work at 9.4-1 and got the same or bettter power.

With high CR in a boat you have very little margin for error timing or fuel wise.

I don't think reverse cooling would work in a non-pressurized open cooling system on a boat. Nor do I think there would be any gains. You can keep a boat motor around 100* with no thermostat with a regular cooling system.

The whole point of reverse cooling was to take the coolest water that has been through the radiator and send it to the heads first. in a race car that would probably still be 190-200* water. Which is better than the 210-220* water coming up from the block.

Smokey Yunick .....Does that bring back memories or what !!!! Watched Curtis Turner smoke em in the Daytona 500 .....Black and Gold Chevelle ......


til it blew ...

Smokey Yunick, i loved that he always pushed the rule book to the limit and then some...he reverse ground cams and turned the motors the same direction as the corners so his car wanted to turn left. he got away with that for a long time

Iīve tried it and used it when i was racing some years ago.
It started when i burned my exhaust valves despite using the biggest jets i could get. We reversed the cooling and the problems disappeared. At that time the motor was a 502 with chevy high perf. cast iron heads. A couple of years later i upgraded the motor with Dart aluminum heads. We continued with the reversed cooling and it worked without problem. We
took in the water in front and in the back of the heads.
Everyone we talked to in different shops here in Sweden thought we were kind of crazy since they have never heard of anyone doing this, but we proved that it worked. Perhaps it is possible to run the motor with leaner fuel mixture (which we did with the cast iron heads) with cooler heads to burn the fuel more efficient and perhaps get more power (Perhaps some of the motor wizards knows more of this theory). Anyway at that time we didnīt want to risk more burned valves and perhaps pistons so we stuck to the jets recommended by the dyno guy.