Re: 1959 Glasscat Catamaran Project Underway.
Hi Guys,
Sorry for the long absence guys, I have been working a great deal of time this month and really no time for boat building. That being said this last weekend I did get to do a lot to Dreams.
I got sent home from work today very early so I grabbed my boat and my daughters and we went to the lake. I finally had a wonderful second splash today. We stayed on the water for 3 or 4 hours solid. I have been working on the boat over the weekend with the help of my good friend willyclay. Over the weekend again thanks to Bill’s suggestions and my Seloc book I was (finally able to take the darned carburetor off) and rebuild it. It runs like a champ for the most part. I can start and stop it at leisure. (The girls wanted to jump out in their life jackets and swim in the middle of the lake. So I let them jump out; I had a 30 foot line thrown out and told them to keep a hold of it in their hands. Also the lake was dead so there was not too much danger of other boats coming upon us, and lastly it is a very low altitude lake and the water was mid-seventies so I was not worried about them cramping up. (I’ll probably be excoriated here for allowing them off, but it was so hot out there I did not have the heart to tell them no). It fired right up in the center of the lake with no problems. It runs very well actually. It even gets up on plane!!!(It kinda scared me a little the first time I hit the throttle and the nose lifted). I thought everybody here told me it would not plane. She actually scoots fast enough for an old and little motor. We crossed the lake many times fairly rapidly. Dreams will plane at about ? throttle. (I don’t know what speed that is or anything).
That was the good; Now for the bad.
The shift cable I think is going to need to be replaced. It will not pull far enough to lock into forward gear. I tried adjusting everyway from Sunday (inside the control box and at the cable ends) and I need just a millimeter or more to get it into gear. If I run back and give it a gentle slap it locks right in. and just in case boat gear boxes throw out of gear I took a bungee and hooked it up so that it would hold the tranny in gear. I don’t know if it needed it but it felt better to know it was there.
The other main problem is that at full WOT it starts to grumble and backfire a little. Bill told me about synchronizing but my book does not give detailed enough directions on how to do it. The Seloc says all over that section to look in appendix….and there is not one in the book. I don’t know if pages were ripped out or what. Does anybody know how to tell me how to do this in plain English? The nearest I got was adjusting some little linkage of some sort on port side of the motor (and that helped a lot).
Through trial and error today; I found I can get the motor very, very, very close to WOT, and it runs great all the way from 0 to just shy of WOT and only if I push it the last little bit does she grumble. Honestly I am happy with it as it is and don’t need to go WOT at all, I did not want to push her too far, so when she grumbled so I backed down a hair. Could it be just because it is old and connected to a heavy boat? Fuel consumption was about 11/2 gallons each 45 min of high throttle. Does that sound about right?
Sorry for the long note today, I have missed you guys and just wanted to let you know what happened in my world.
Now I know really why Andrew has so many boats!!!! I am most certainly hooked after today (I think my girls are also... They kept telling me how old and ugly my boat was and how they were never going on….yada, yada, but it was so hot here today the decided that an ugly boat at the lake was preferable to a hot summer day in Fresno). The last comment they made as we got home tonight was….”So dad, when are we going again”?
HA! I won…..Now if I can only get their mother to try once….
I really had a powerful experience today (near tears) and I wanted to tell you all thanks for all the help and friendship you all have given me over the last year for without you guys I would never be here today at this point.
Dave