Looks like it has boat things for exhaust/water. So I'm guessing headers and waterpump. Are these direct drive or some weird kind of torque converter? Have I found my direct drive single speed V8 combo for Challenge glory?
Looks like it has boat things for exhaust/water. So I'm guessing headers and waterpump. Are these direct drive or some weird kind of torque converter? Have I found my direct drive single speed V8 combo for Challenge glory?
Double check engine rotation.
My '68 Correct Craft Ski Nautique had a reverse rotation Big Block 352 Ford.
Went to replace a bad starter with an Autozone remanuf. part and never could get it to start, until I discovered it was spinning the engine over the wrong way. That took a lot of time and many, many four letter words to discover.
I did it for a swap and replaced the whole top end , you can get away with just a camshaft change though. The marine cam will peak out at like 3,000 RPM, it's meant to run that way all day.
So the engine in that picture looks like a stern drive application, the reduction gearing and shifting mechanism is all in the outdrive. As mentioned above, be aware of rotation and that these are tuned for torque; there’s no down hill on the water. The 350 in my boat is basically a truck engine with 4 bolt mains that’s been modified to tolerate raw water cooling. WOT is 4,400-4,600 rpm per the Mercruiser manual. If it’s been run in salt water it could be pretty crusty inside.
Edited to add, that looks very much like mine. So likely a pre-vortec 350; it’s probably more than 30 years old.
Yeah looks like after conversion and stuff it's not worth the buy in for Challenge purposes. It'd have to be free I think.
In reply to Stampie (FS) :
You need a matching pair, so one will be reverse rotation. Then you can connect one to each rear wheel.
If it's like the 454 mercruiser then the block will have a higher nickel content then the car 350.
MotorsportsGordon said:If it's like the 454 mercruiser then the block will have a higher nickel content then the car 350.
Not necessarily. Some of the marine engines are the better quality blocks with 4 bolt mains, but some (including the pair of 454s in my boat) are just plain 2 bolt blocks with nothing special about them.
In general, marine engines aren't some magic bullet for performance.
In general, marine engines aren't some magic bullet for performance.
Weight was not as much a consideration for boat use, but corrosion resistance was so cast iron is more common than aluminum alloys, and high rpm just wasn't an issue. have to agree that as far as four stroke boat engines go, they aren't generally a good starting point for a performance car engine.
The exceptions are the outboard two strokes - some of these were converted to car use very successfully. Bill Steven's Scepter sports racer out of Portland was a killer small bore car that started life with a Mercury outboard - loudest thing on the track until the Mazda rotaries showed up. He later ran it with a Fiat 850 engine in H sports racing and to get double the race time, he would slap on a defroster fan on the air intake so he could call it a supercharged car (even though the thing probably reduced flow) and ran a class up.
A friend who was a Nautique dealer for years has a 502 in his 33 Ford that came out of a ski boat. He used the ecu and everything. Other than the exhaust manifolds, obviously. It appears to be very similar to the Ramjet crate motor stuff, with no O2 sensors, due to wet manifolds and such.
I think its pretty rare these days to have reverse rotation.
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