July 2023
Greg Harris has been a car enthusiast for years and has built a number of muscle machines and classic trucks. He has had loads of fun with late-model cars, but he couldn’t shake the fact that he really had the yearning to build a street rod some day. His friends knew about his longtime goal, so when one of them found a partially completed early sedan for sale, he told Harris about the car. Harris went to take a look, and as it turned out, the car was a half-finished all-steel ’33 Ford two-door sedan powered by a 427 Chevy engine. He immediately knew he had to buy the sedan—it was just what he was looking for. He made a deal with Clark and Bridgett Short, the folks who started the project, and brought the ’33 home.
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Billy Blair is a man with a lot going on. He owns a pool building company that brings in a serious amount of business in Southern California and that allows him to play around with some other fun things like cable TV shows and, well, performance boats. We’ve seen a few of his boats over the years and they are always extremely well appointed and often understated in many ways.
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Boaters who traveled from as far away as Houston to participate in the first Smokin’ the Sound Poker Run were not disappointed. They enjoyed excellent weather, great hospitality at all of the Poker Run stops and they got up close and personal with the best spectator venue on the Offshore Super Series Powerboat Racing Association circuit.
Because there were several who were experiencing their first Poker Run, the basics were outlined in a morning meeting. Participating boats would each receive a card in a sealed envelope at each of the stops on the Poker Run route with the top three hands winning the prize money.
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The camshaft is often called an engine’s “brain,” and that’s an apt comparison. The cam controls all the major timing events in the valvetrain, which means it is responsible for how efficiently the engine can ingest and combust the air/fuel mixture. Choosing the right cam profile for your engine
combination is the key to making the most possible power.
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When someone buys a boat as a bare hull and finishes it themselves, the odds are that the boat won’t be nearly as sanitary as the original manufacturer rigged it. The original owner of this boat did a decent job but it was no way up to the usual Howard standards. The owner wanted the rigging cleaned up, spiffed up and colored up so he took it to Maveric Marine in Van Nuys, California where Dan Duffin straightened everything out and color-coordinated the powdercoating.
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Ok, so you have your quarter-million dollar boat with twin 500 EFI Mercruiser engines for a total horsepower of just under 1000, but that just isn’t enough. What do you do? Well… there is one relatively easy way to dramatically increase horsepower, that’s right—a supercharger. On top of the power increase you get that cool unmistakable whine that will cause any wrench head to notice. This particular install is a stage 3 Whipple supercharger which will add approximately 240 hp per engine; in essence, we are adding a third engine.
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We chronicled the building of the Challenger 600 EFI engine over the course of two months and now the boat is ready to get out on the water for testing. We headed out to Lake Elsinore in Southern California (one of the few lakes without a speed limit) and gave the boat a whirl. With the help of Paul Pfaff Racing Engine’s Gordon Jennings we had a good day on the water.
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I have been working as a marine tech for about five years now, and one thing I have learned is that you have to be somewhat of a contortionist to deal with some boats. I have learned many things that can make the job a lot less painful. If you find yourself in a situation with your own boat that seems impossible, try calling your local marine shop. Chances are that the experts there will be able to give you some advice to help you through the problem. Meanwhile, here are a few tips to help you out with some common problems you may run into.
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All summer you’ve dreamed of passing all those boats that have blown by you since June. Now that time has come. You plunk down a large stack of greenbacks for a nasty supercharger and wrench all weekend bolting it in. Now comes the moment of truth. As you tear down the lake, all eyes are on the gauges, and the oil pressure is heading south too quickly. What could be wrong? You let off the throttle for a bit and all the vital signs return to normal.
We’ve ran into this exact scenario before. We installed an R-Tech Supercooler on the ProCharged Dorr’s Marine Engine 502cid motor in our Baja 250ES. The install was a huge success with a whopping 9mph increase in top speed. The boat worked well, but what we weren’t expecting was the huge increase in oil temperature from the gain in horsepower. If we had stayed on the throttle for a good 5,000-plus-rpm run, the oil temperature would have shot for the moon and oil pressure would have dropped to an uncomfortable level, forcing us to back out—what fun is that?
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Ever see those boats on the TV show Fear Factor? Those are Ultra Custom Boats built by John West and his team in El Cajon, California. Ever watch Monster Garage? That is Jesse James from West Coast Choppers, which is based in Long Beach, California. What happens when these two guys get together to build a boat and a bike is what we have here.
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