Reviving An Old Drag Boat With An LS Swap!

this is the boat from roadkill remember that one time friedrich and i went to lake elsinore pulled the motor out of the truck stuck it in this boat went boating for two hours then went back and put the motor back in the truck towed this thing home well we just shot another episode of roadkill and when we were done we brought cousin randy's boat all the way to georgia and we are cleaning it up and putting a new to us ls3 in there and i think by tomorrow afternoon we'll hear some noise but uh you guys are gonna like this this is ls3 engine block oil support ring oil expander ring ls3 piston this was all in this boat as a result of the roadkill episode i can't wait for you guys to see that cleaning's going really well you can still still see some oil residue most of the major parts are out of here oh there's another one i suppose maybe shoot on top of the tank too in case there's pieces of pieces of pistons oh there's another chunk of piston that just came out [Applause] wow that makes sense because the hole in the block was right about here so it just launched oil behind it just try to shove rags up under there because we're going to want to put carpet in here at some point and we're we're not gonna be able to do that if eight years later it's still leaking oil from the left it's not gonna stick very well no not from the last engine blow up so the wiring is so covered in oil that we've got to cut all the zip ties and then simple green the wires and then we'll hit it with some of that tech flex from wirecare to protect them so instead of using 8 million zip ties we'll just use something a little cooler okay so let's talk about this motor this is a aluminum block ls3 it has mast cylinder heads on it it has a single four barrel intake billet valve covers shaft rockers under the valve covers we don't know anything else we dynoded at most speed shop in the attempter nova and i think it made 700 on like a 200 shot of nitrous what'd this thing make made 485 to the tire in a and what did it make on the bottle 7 19. 7 19 on about a 200 shot um to the tire yeah so you put that same shot in that jet boat and that's a legit high 90 mile an hour jet boat we're gonna start out with a tunnel ram and two fours and i bet this boat will probably go 75 probably 80 miles an hour like it'll be fun it'll be a lot of fun and then uh you know later on we can we can go from there thanks to the nitrous oxide but for now i'm going to strip off the car parts like this quicktime bell housing not using that when this goes in the boat it'll just have a front and rear motor plate to mount it into the boat and then it'll have a flex plate and a pto type adapter that'll adapt the rear the crankshaft flange directly to the drive shaft to the jet drive so we don't need any of this heavy stuff anymore so out it comes and one day maybe we'll find a replacement ls3 to put back in the attempted murder nova but the odds are good that car is not going to run the rest of the year all right so this is an sfi bell housing it has a mid plate here that doesn't bolt to the vehicle at all what it does is contain the bottom half of this and so you've got to remove all of these bolts along the bottom which are 3 8 16 with a nut and a hex head bolt you got to take all those out in order to separate the bell housing from the mid plate the mid plate is behind flywheel and clutch so that stays on there this comes off then that gives you access to the clutch bolt okay bingo all right now the clutch comes off these look like eight millimeter ones yep [Applause] we are now bolting on the motor plates to the engine and the flex plate and then we're going to roll the boat inside and install the entry this thing ran like a champ how quick did it go seven something in there six sixty son just fifty in the eighth man all over the racetrack and that was when i left easy that was when i babied it off the line the next time around would have been good if the track would have held it oh that's what it that's what it was i remember the last pass was a seven something 7-eleven was the second one it's always uh that was the last thing you do that they remember forgot all about that six second eighth mile fast i remembered the eight the seven second which is the last one you made where it just it was fun the tires half track that car could never be accused of handling easy [Music] rear rear motor plate either the dowel has to come out or we need to trim this to get this on yeah the dowel the dowel was out of the other one was it yeah that was out of the other one i was like why the hell is the dowel out now i know yeah let's just trim it in the band so all right so here's what's going on this is the rear motor plate for the renegade the cutout for the flex plate is just a hair too small it's about i'd say 3 16 of an inch too small in diameter so it doesn't want to go past the flex plate which means it needed to go on before the flex plate went on but i'm not taking the flex plate off we've already you know lock tightened the bolts we've torqued them to spec yada yada yada so what i'm going to do is take these accessories off this thing draw a line put it in my trusty vertical bandsaw and cut a new shape here and then install it all right so here's our motor plate oh not getting that back anytime soon so i'm taking this thing apart on a new welding table that i have it's from strong hand tools it's called a rhino cart it's really cool for fixturing things and clamping things of all different shapes and sizes because it has these holes in the top of it where you can put all these attachments for clamping things down you can also drop a stainless steel washer through those holes that goes to your engine plate and um yeah i'm not going fishing for that later because that's that's that sinking feeling where you drop something in the engine compartment and you don't hear it make it all the way to the ground you found it well we're not sinking anymore look at all the boat analogies sweet anyway um i'm going to trace a new pattern here i'm going to increase this by about 3 16 of an inch all the way around and then cut it in the vertical band saw and then this should go on you long time fans of the show will recognize this this is my grabbed vertical bandsaw which i got off craigslist in north carolina rented a u-haul trailer went and bought it from a guy who was shutting down his nascar shop because he said he didn't need these tools anymore he had cad or fusion 360 and he just sent files places and somebody else you know did the work he didn't need these manual tools anymore and so i bought it drug it home got the u-haul trailer in my driveway and then tied a tow strap around blasphemy's trailer hitch and around this and drug this off of that thing if you haven't seen it go way back to the very beginning of this channel and you can watch that now let me demonstrate the awesome power of the grab vertical bandsaw by the way when cutting aluminum it helps to lube the blade this is linux lube tube i bought this years ago probably 10 years ago and i still have this much left you can just bar soap you don't even need this like i prefer irish spring because you know finnegan but uh whatever irish spring dove you know if you're a dove kind of guy i mean i'm not going to judge you it works you know all that matters is that you lube your blade you don't want to clog it up you want to be able to keep going you know no friction [Music] engage here's another tip when you get close to the end and you really don't want your fingers in front of the blade just get a sacrificial piece of wood and use that to push the piece through i learned that from mrc fab one of the guys who used to work there in fact he made this sacrificial piece of wood that's how long they've had it see why now the blade can run into the wood and not my fingers look at that precision like right now you're going damn mike if i didn't know any better i'd say you had a plasma table or a water jet or something no you'd be wrong i don't have that just good eyesight and quality tools that's what i got i hope this fits boom clearance clearance something's going on ah this oil pan hits the bottom of the boat jack it up quick [Music] we need the oil pan off the blown-up motor and hopefully it's not blown up or we need to overnight an oil pan so i guess tomorrow we found out what happened to the old motor hopefully the pickup tube and windage tray hasn't completely destroyed yes i don't like this oil pan anyway it's way too small for a jet boat well i think it happens for a reason yeah that's probably what that is is it's like you would have blown this motor up with a five quart pan you know it's direct dry there's no trans so you're driving around at like three four thousand rpm just cruising and then you mat it and so much oil is in the top end of the motor that runs the pan dry so all right [Music] so last night we're trucking along we got our ls3 ready to go in the boat rare motor plate is on front motor plates drive shaft like we're feeling good we set it in there and it doesn't quite want to sit down on the rails that these little feet bolt to and uh it didn't take too long to figure out the fact that the bottom of this oil pan was sitting on the bottom of the boat which is no bueno um ideally we'd be running a much larger but shallower oil oil pan and what i mean by that is it would be a box style pan and so it wouldn't hang as far down from the pan rail but it would have more capacity this is a five quart oil pan in a jet boat it would be nice to have a 10 quart oil pan and the reason for that is there's no transmission so your cruising rpm in most jet boats is somewhere between three and four thousand rpm so now imagine driving three and four thousand rpm for a minute or two at a time maybe more and then you just you know you start feeling froggy and you go hammer down you know well you've pumped a lot of oil to the top end of the motor by driving it at that rpm for a long period of time there's not much left in the pan so then when you go high rpm bad things can happen so in jet boats traditionally we run 10 to 14 quart oil pans we don't have access to one of those but what we do have is another oil pan that is shallower and does not increase our oil capacity but at least it doesn't hit the bottom of the boat so we're going to put this in here today so we can get the motor running and then later on down the road we will put a bigger aftermarket pan on this it's just not going to happen right now unfortunately we've already filled it with oil so now we've got to find something clean to drain all that oil back out change pans then continue on with our adventure 12 point pro tip oh god do you want 7 16 pro tip use the six point 10 millimeter on the bottom of your ls3 not the 12 point 7 16 i mean sometimes that'll work but i wouldn't trust it every time and that's a pro tip damn right right no she did not stock not stock that's so awesome bam it has cp pistons dude look is that for weight it's been balanced yeah but dude it has cp pistons what kind of rods are those this is so cool i don't know but it's nice it's not stock at all dude somebody built this thing oh yeah wow if only we knew what the ring gaps were oil pan is off we took the opportunity to look up inside the engine trying to figure out what this thing is because we don't know the history of this engine we bought this used from a guy named steve shaw who's no longer with us uh he said it was built but we didn't know exactly what that meant so far we've only taken the valve covers off this in the entire time we've owned it and found jesus shaft rockers underneath there which is a great sign um but we had no idea what was in the bottom end uh now that we have the pan off we've discovered it has a nice set of cp forged pistons in there and a set of molnar connecting rods we don't know what the ring gaps are we don't know what the compression ratio is we were able to get a number off the piston which i have emailed to the guys at cp to find out maybe they can tell us compression ratio we could have with a set of mast heads and those pistons um you know again we don't know what the ring gaps are so we don't know how far we can beat on this thing but it is full of really good parts so we feel good about buying this and we're going to do our best not to wound it so next step will be put the new oil pump pickup on the new windage tray the new pan stab it in the boat take the single four off of it because we have a tunnel ram and it's a jet boat they look cooler with tunnel ramps and obviously that tunnel ram will make a little bit more power i don't care who you are they're usually good for 20 to 30 horsepower minimum over a really good single plane intake and so we're gonna do all that i don't know if we'll get it started today because now we're really far behind but we're definitely gonna try i've been calling this an ls3 because i had seen a gray sensor on the side of the engine block uh which goes to the reluctor wheel which tells the computer or ignition system that you're running what position the crankshaft is in now the gray connector in the side of the block usually indicate it's a late model motor with a 58x reluctor wheel the black connector is usually an earlier model block gen 3 ls which would have a 24 tooth reelector wheel however newburn noticed that although this does have a cam sensor on the front timing cover which also indicates a later model motor it has one sitting here in the top of the block which would indicate an early model motor so what we're guessing has happened here is somebody used an early model ls6 block i'm guessing but a later model crankshaft with a 58x wheel and probably put a later model timing cover on it you know there's nothing stock about this so who really knows so is it an ls2 is it an ls3 dude i don't know it's badass that's all that matters it's an it's a badass ls engine that is going to make that rogers jet boat really fun to drive uh one last thing before we put our pan on we reinstalled the windage tray that was on there looks like it is going to clear the new pickup and before we put the pan on we want to verify the depth between the pickup and the bottom of the pan um that is critical okay if you have too far of a gap between this and the bottom of the pan at low oil levels it can suck air and cavitate the oil pump if you bottom this out on the pan it might not pick up any oil because it needs to pick it up right here so what you're looking for is an air gap of about a quarter of an inch i don't like to run any more than that so what we're going to do is use this square and we're going to go off the pan rail with the gasket to this point right here and then we can measure from our new oil pan rail here down to the bottom of the pan the difference in the measurements is our air gap on the pan rail now that's basically square okay there you go all right so now if i flip it the other way lay this on the rail of our oil pan this should be no more than a quarter inch off the bottom of the sump area so let's go over there and measure that this part which is the furthest from the pan rail is still an eighth of an inch off the bottom of the oil pan this is sitting at as an angle so as you move over this is off the pan by plenty of clearance so i'm calling it good we can now bolt our pan on awesome we have oh plenty of clearance i mean this is great oh look at all the clearance now go ahead just let her on down boom we now have an ls swapped rogers bonneville tr you gotta like it's official tell me about all this other slang i just call it a roger you gotta like oh you got a school wheel on everything else all right so we'll give you a little history i don't know if there's another rogers bonneville tr that's been ls swapped maybe there is i'm i'm not up on all things but um from the factory what was in this alright so this is a 76 the bonneville tr came out i think in 74 and your choices would have been 460 ford 454 chevy at that point they might still have been doing 455 oldsmobiles not sure but um the history of this this guy named roger wyman his father was making jetboats in 69 and early 70. he and his son got into an argument over what i don't know and his son decided to start his own company so there was a wyman custom boats and then there became a rogers custom boats rogers was his son roger wyman his father stopped making boats pretty early on like i think by 70 71 and so roger comes out with a boat called the cyclone which is the boat my parents bought brand new in 71. so it's a boat i spent 30 years riding around and wow and it was a v bottom jet boat 18 foot long so it was shorter than this and it had a deeper v and it was like a little stunt boat like it wasn't fast but dude cornered like you would not believe it yeah and then he made the super cyclone which was a stretched version of that original v-bottom he had it had a flat deck and and it was about a foot longer and then he made the bonneville which is this boat here with this is called a bubble deck has a bubble right there so he made the bonneville which is an 18 foot long v bottom that had the super cyclone bottom i think but a bubble deck which is a brand new style that he copied from sanger boats then he made the bonneville tr which is a 19-foot version of the bubble deck and it has these dropped chinese right here and i don't know if tr stood for tunnel runner or what but this is what a tr has and none of the other rogers boats has it really then he made like a 20-foot day cruiser that had the same kind of deck as this had a bubble deck then he made a 21 foot day cruiser but this was this was it like this boat was a rocket i've been 116 in a bonneville tr with a bull blown big block chevy which i don't recommend doing these boats have held records in circle boat racing drag boat racing like these were these were it back in the day and they're fairly outdated now like there's been numerous hull designs that are arguably better than this however i will maintain that one of these set up with big power will whole shot most every other jet boat out there really yeah there's only a couple i think would that would have hole shot this thing like a cp going which is a california performance hull um but these work really good you don't want to go 120 miles an hour in one because it's a v bottom boat and they're just not stable they kind of do this but whole shot race to 100 miles an hour dude good boat and with this motor naturally aspirated this thing should go over 80 probably 85 and with nitrous dude 100 is easy in one of these so so i just need a couple of fishing rod holders and you know a fish finder and i'm ready to go yeah pretty much you can go fishing in this really fast all right uh we have tools i'll tighten down the feet and then we can plop the intake off put the tunnel ram on hook up the water hoses and the wiring put the headers on and it's ready to fire up like great thing about jet boats is you only need like half an hour to gut one it only takes like an hour or two to make it run again so we're good so these are masked motorsports black label rectangular port heads you need some um wow these are cnc ported dude really yeah they're beautiful absolutely beautiful oh my goodness yeah uh yeah i need an allen wrench to get these out wow it's got head studs too damn she's bad she real bad so we spend a short period of time with you getting used to driving it and then it needs spray it would it'd almost be a shame not to spray this when it has this motor in here we put the place diverter nozzle on a timer put the spray on a timer get the whole shot just perfect where as soon as it comes out of the hole that nitrous turns on bang dude you're gone then you go soft wools off we are about to install a holley high ram to replace that edelbrock single four barrel intake a because it looks cooler it's bigger and b it also will run better but here's a couple of tips for you the high ram comes with these studs got to be careful when you install them there are two different length threads here short side should go into the cylinder head however you still need to be careful because not all the holes in the heads are blind on this particular set of heads these are masked black label heads the corner so passenger side front corner is not blind driver's side rear corner is not blind why do we care well that's how far the stud goes into a blind hole right there right should go in that far when you go here it'll go in that far if you install the long side of the stud here and accidentally thread it in way too far you can actually run this into a push rod which will bend it scrape it send metal into the oil don't ask me why but apparently i've done that before so short thread side down and be careful how far you thread it in there's your tip and also use a tunnel ram because like guaranteed more power saw it on engine masters okay i'm a fan of the black valve covers because they match the carburetors i'm thinking all the hardware in this boat should be black like the rail kit the motor plates like everything that is so cool oh man i love it helium [Music] all right what's what here i don't remember uh try ignition oh i think that might have been the bilge pup let's see come on baby pick up some fuel okay hold on it's closed it is closed it's hard to pick up fuel especially when the double support okay try now oh oh oh there we go so the big bowl these bowls over here i don't it's not in the middle i don't even see it it's either high or too low okay that's too high these two are low yeah those ones are too high and these ones are too low now we're almost at eight psi go ahead and fire it uh what's wrong here yeah flip it up and hit the start button try it again [Music] okay ready [Applause] let's just take this off like a timing light and it fires right up it's like hold on now i'm ready to go uh [Music] [Music] it drops out i don't know what to make of that well we can pull a valve cover and see if there's oil okay here's where we're at we made a video about bringing the renegade rogers jet boat home to georgia and then we pulled out the blown up twin turbo ls3 we installed the motor of newborn's attempted murder nova which is no longer with us r.i.p moment of silence okay moving on and then um when we fired that engine up in this boat it was really unhappy it had very little oil pressure and we're pretty sure that's a problem between our oil pump and oil pump pan pickup it's a lot of peas we're gonna fix that problem right here right now we have ordered a larger capacity oil pan this looks nothing like most oil pans for an ls motor because that is a full length sump this will not fit in a car however this should fit into our jet boat and give us not four not five not six not seven quarts of capacity this will give us 10 quarts of capacity which is good in a jet boat and here's why that jet boat has no transmission which means cruising speed and cruising rpm are really high 30 miles an hour in that boat is about 2500 rpm so you can imagine if you're cruising all day long at say 4000 rpm and all of a sudden you decide to stand on the throttle with a 5 quart pan there's not a lot there's not much oil left in that pan when you do that and it's a good way to blow up your motor this new 10 quart oil pan came from the dudes at socal jetboat speech shop and we're going to be installing it on an upcoming episode of finnegan's garage so that you guys can finally see the renegade rip across my local lake thanks for watching

Channel: Finnegan's Garage

Views: 383,308

Rating: 4.9622641 out of 5

Keywords: hot rod, jet boat, drag boat, ls, ls swap, tunnel ram, how-to, diy, roadkill, finnegan, freiburger, racing

Id: Mambv16uKCg

Length: 29min 53sec (1793 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021