unlimited hydro

[Unregistered]

did anyone watch the hydro races on tv this last weekend, first piston powered hydro to beat the hair dryers since 1989. allison powered I hear.

[mayday51]

piston power

.....good stuff there,
this team has been working for this for years
and last year at San Diego showed
they had the 'stuff'.

....try looking at:
Hydroprop.com

has quite a bit (look at the history pages too!)

.........you will be surprized at the names you find,
......(these are aircraft piston engines)
(a parallel racing form)


Mayday51

[bearfan1]

Got goosebumps when I heard they qualified first at San Diego last year. I heard they were running a new hull, either late last year when they qualified first, or this year. It was supposed to lighter and faster then their older hull they were running last year. I have several pics of it from last year, but none of the new hull. This is assuming you are talking about the Master Tire U-3 hydro, which I believe is the only V-12 hydro on the circut

Side note, here in Detroit last weekend, the thunder returned to the Detroit River, as three unlimited hydros sporting V-12's came to town for a demo race. Miss Century 21, Saviers Probe, and the Budwiser, all from the Seattle Hydroplane and Raceboat Museum, along with several other smaller class vintage hydros.

I'll attempt to post a few photos cuz hey, a V-12 is a V-12

[bearfan1]

The Century 21 hydro owned by Barbara carper

[bearfan1]

2nd attempt and nada, Oh well, it's been fun!

Try this

http://www.geocities.com/renovids4u/cent21_001.jpg

Not working either, Wayne, can you help ? Suggestions ?

Tried the image tags and nada, tried the url and nada.

Bearfan

[AAFO_WSagar]

Hey BearFan... well... Geocities has blocking in place, usually, to keep linked images from showing up... This is to keep what is known in the web hosting "industry" as "leaching"... especially for free sites like Geo, this is to keep guys from using Geo to host their images there and websites elsewhere..

I can't imagine this is as big of a problem now as it used to be when web space was so much more costly than it is now... There are many web hosts who will sell several hundred megs of storage space and tons of bandwidth for under ten bucks a month now days.. hard to see why anyone would abuse a freebie like geo... anyway... back to the problem here....

We have the board upload limits set to images no wider than 600pixels wide, this was in an effort to keep the pages from totally blowing into a side scrolling mess when people upload images. I'm sure some of you remember some from the old board, or images sometimes linked from elsewhere on this board that cause that effect..

Anyway, long story short, if the image is one pixel wider than 600, the board will not allow it.. also, if it's larger than something like 170kilobytes, it will not allow it.. This is to keep the page load times decent, because an un-optimized .jpg or .gif file can be HUGE and look no better than one that has the correct amount of "compression" set to it...

Anyway.. if you can give me the specs on the image you're trying to upload, I can tell ya better why it wont...

Would love to see the images...

On this same subject (engines, not pictures) one wonders, would a rebirth of the thunder boats be good or bad for air racing??

On the one hand, it could mean a draining of available parts to camps who have more money and who are notably more destructive of said parts.. on the other hand.. could it spawn a new generation of purpose built parts??

Could we see the advent of brand new V-12's based on the old ones??

Interesting concept!

Wayne

[bearfan1]

Thanks for the info Wayne. I saw the stated limit of 140kb's and tried to keep the images about 100kb, but didn't see anything about the pixel size. I had reduced the images from 1024 to 640, but that is obviously still to large. Let me try it again, but Geocities still might be an added problem too.

Thanks again for the help.

Bearfan1

[bearfan1]

Test

[GriffonGirl]

thunderboats!!

I've been following the Unlimited Hydroplanes since 1972, when the big boys ran Griffon, Merlin, and Allsion poweplants and they were the real "Thunderboats"....before the mid-ninties "turbin take-over".

Guess you can still call this the "fastest water sport" ....heheh

You can always find GriffonGirl here on the last weekend of July!! http://www.columbiacup.com/

By the way, quite a few air-racing crews and crew chiefs came from the old piston boat days, right DOC?....Love you guys!!

-gg

[AAFO_WSagar]

GriffonGirl..

I know Dwight (THE DOCTOR) Thorn was involved early on with the boats, I do NOT know a lot of his history with same. I'm remembering some background information that he gave us when we did the "Ask The Doctor" thing for the NAG Banquet a couple years ago, I think it's somewhere on the site.. I'd be the last one to know where !!

Wondering if you could dig up some information from your sources up there in Tri-Cities and find out some of the history of guys who crossed over from the Thunderboats to Air Racing. I am pretty sure there were more than a few but I could be totally wrong.. Neal might know a bit about this.. I suspect, Brad or Randy Haskin, likely quite a bit, but I don't think Brad comes around much anymore.

Anyone else??

It'd be interesting to look at this history, particularly, if the boats are gonna get smart and lose the "hair dryer" thing and go back to THUNDER!!!

Wayne

[speeddemon]

hydro history

There's a LOT of links between the two sports.

Bill Stead, who founded the races was a driver for the Bill Waggoner team in the 1950's. He raced a boat named the Hurricane IV, as well as Waggoner's two "Maverick" boats. He won the 1959 Gold Cup and the National Championship the same year.

Mira Slovak, who raced Stead's Bearcat, was also a hydro racer, driving such boats as Bill Boeing's "Miss Wahoo", "Miss Bardahl" (in which he won the 1958 National Championship), "Chrysler Crew", and Bill Harrah's "Tahoe Miss" (in which he won the '66 Gold Cup and National Championship).

Chuck Lyford, owner/pilot of the Bardahl Special, was a champion limited driver, crewed on the U-62 "Thriftway Too", and was Project Manager for the U-95 project...the first turbine powered Unlimited Hydroplane.

Dwight Thorn did work on Dave Heerenspergers automotive "Pay 'n Pak" in 1970, and the follow-on Merlin powered version the following year. He also helped significantly on the U-95 project with Chuck Lyford.

Dixon Smith and Pete Law have both done carb and adi/flow-systems on the Unlimiteds---Planes and boats.

Russ Schleeh, who raced Wayne Adams "Maytag Mustang" in '65 and '66 was also 1956 National Champion in Bill Waggoner's "Shanty I". He also drove "Thriftway Too" in 1960, and Harrah's "Tahoe Miss" in 1962.


There are a LOT of others. These are just the early examples. Mostly it's just a case of "common interests" that the sports share. People like fast, loud planes, cars, boats, etc.

Speed Demon

[AAFO_WSagar]

Speed Demon,

Great recapping of the ties between these two great sports!

I don't think I'm alone in wishing that the "thunder" would return to water and that we might see a rebirth of sorts of pistons in this (boats) sport....

Competition for parts would not be a good thing, they are in short enough supply already but, with the passing of Bernie Little, the sport is going to need *something* to keep it alive...

Maybe the aural experience of hearing the thunder, once again, would not only keep Unlimited Boat Racing alive, maybe, just maybe, the tie could not only keep this end of it alive, it might just breathe a new bit of life into both ends of "unlimited" piston power..

We all know, there is NOTHING quite like hearing BIG pistons thrashing... nothing!

Wayne Sagar