keltik

Next weekend once the paint has hardened, I'll flip the hull over, make some small modifications and paint the inside. Hoping to put a proper firewall in and add a frame around the engine cover opening so it can bear weight, be walked on and get sealed better to keep the waves out.

Welded on the new bits using the small amount of welding skills I possess. Grinder n paint. Found a couple more surprise pinholes that got welded up. Then I decided to paint the hull again using a proper primer this time. None of this work is stuff I'm supremely proud of, but it's good enough.

Stripped off the gobs of bathroom sealant and carried out a thorough inspection of the hull. There were multiple pinholes and paper thin steel. Ended up cutting a modest amount of crap from the starboard side but took a massive amount of crusty garbage out of the port side. Mr Greer sent me some lovely 2.5mm plate to craft my patches from. I dont have a brake or anything like the right kind of tools for bending - so the patches were formed using a hammer, a vice and vast amounts of aggression.

VVTI delete and add lumpy idle to your repertoire of surprise. Bottom end is where the peasants live, just keep the tacho needle where eagles dare

On the bright side, it might result in more posts in this thread - and I'm OK with that.

A few minutes with the strip disc and flap wheel turned this... Into this: Amusingly that's not even the side that was leaking. This one is. You can see the peeled off 'patch' and the offending hole that let all of the river go for a spin through the bilge pump. Today's mission is to head down to the metal recyclers and obtain some replacement metal to hot glue in there.

Well it's been 2 months of ignoring this thing in the shed and what do you know....it still isn't fixed. 3 trips as passenger in other people's boats has motivated me a little tho. So it's time to flip the hull. I pushed it off the trailer and naively thought I could just roll it over using muscle power with the misses holding my hernia in. Turns out steel is heavy. That's no way my shed could support a chainfall so I got out the trolley jack and a series of wooden props.

Missus has one of these so can happily look at bits you might need to figure out. They do run a heat exchanger in the exhaust after the cat

Have had to replace a Qashqai pedal and a Pulsar pedal recently. Was pretty rare that we ever had to do a VE pedal - just lots of the v6 throttle bodies. Anything GM/LS makes life easy

The noise was hilarious, 2 stroke lawnmower followed by a car bonnet being dragged down the road.

Well bugger. Have been taking on more water than I'd like lately. Today's trip ripped off some more bathroom sealant and bog to reveal.... Gonna need to remove the fuel tank to fix it properly. Could this be the time to strip the whole hull and patch everything up nicely? Or do I bodge it up for a few more trips?

I do like your rear view mirror idea. Time to rummage through my parts bin and see if there's a suitable one lying around

It's fun to have an engine where you can try wacky experimental stuff and if it blows up, you're left with a few hundred rebuild cost instead of thousands

Invented by Satan to keep small engine mechanics in business and developed by nazis to actually make power.

Best be naming this thing the ship of Theseus

Turns out I'm a moron and those fuel injectors were hoopajooped. Changed the filter and cleaned the bowl, everything was covered in this fine silt crap. I figured of its on the inside of the filter bowl - it's on the inside of the injectors. Then it hit me. What causes detonation, crappy power and chunks to break off a piston - shit fuelling! There was also one time I started the engine and it locked on one cylinder. I'll bet number 4 injector was leaky and that's what screwed the old motor. Anyways, the internet was half divided on whether you could/should run VT-VY injectors on a VS ECU. Everyone agreed they would fit and had the same capacity and impedance....But a solid 90% of posts said you would need a map to suit. One guy posted on the justcommodores forum that he did it and drove around for a few weeks and nothing bad happened. That's the sort of scientific evidence I needed! So on went the VY injectors with fuel rail, pressure reg and a new filter. Drove to the boat ramp, fired it up and boy did it sound quite different. So went for a quick lap and holy shit, it seems so obvious now that things weren't running right before. Have a listen to the engine note and max rpm compared to earlier videos. What an unbelievable difference.

Fixed the misfire in the first 2 minutes with no tools or spares required - one injector plug wasn't clicked in properly. Had a good test run and got through half a tank of fuel. It's got a lot more power than before and is a fair bit smoother! One problem is that it seems to be pulling timing and losing power the longer you hold it at full throttle. Coming back to quarter throttle for a few seconds feeds the timing back in then you can get on it again. I think I can hear the knock, oil temps are cold and water temp never gets warm so it must either be a hot spot in one of the cylinders or a fuelling issue. I think I can hear the rattle coming from both banks so the current plan is to change the fuel filter and go out for another run with a pressure gauge on it and the scan tool looking at live timing data.

So after the last outing, I whipped off the RH exhaust and realised there was no amount of sealant that was going to fix this. Took it to the local engine shop and had them mill it flat. The bow was to severe for them to sort out so I got it back with the recommendation to have someone else fix it. So I did. Build up the problem side with a skim of high temp JB weld. Make a ghetto surface plate out of some sandpaper glued to an old floor tile. Refitted everything and headed out to the lake with a bunch of spares and tools and a safety tow boat.

You can't beat a jet unit for soaking up horsepower. Could've been running straight magic 50w snake oil with extra children's tears and the old engine was still going to die. I'll be running Total 10w40 semi synthetic again because it's the cheapest oil on tap at work. Might add an oil temp gauge too for some extra eye candy on the dashboard.

Hang on...what's that sitting in cylinder 4? Oh that's the top ring. Not sure where the missing chunk of piston is but it hasn't ruined the cylinder wall or put any dings in the head. P.S I didn't mention it but this thing did start up and run on 4 quite happily after I got home. Bottom end wasn't knocky and it had oil pressure again.

Popped the heads off the old engine and began the autopsy. Wasn't sure what I was going to find but I knew cylinder 6 had low compression and the plug on cylinder 1 was wet with water. So cylinder 6 looked alright but had a little bit of a mark on the head gasket so I think it was leaking a little out to the valley. Cylinder 1 had a very clean piston, wet plug and a head gasket that looked like this... Interesting since pulling the HT lead for cylinder 1 did give a slight exhaust note change and 6 did absolutely nothing. This all explains the blow-by coming out of the valve cover and I guess would also explain a little oil usage. Doesn't quite tell me why it seized tho.

Secured myself a 'new' engine from a VY. Ripped out the old one and spent Saturday swapping exhaust manifolds and intake from the old motor onto the new one. One exhaust manifold was a bit banana and I knew it wouldn't seal but I bolted it on anyways. Ran the motor for a while on the hose with drive shaft disconnected and it sounded good, was a very different exhaust note to the old engine. Went out for a little test at the lake this morning and it had a big exhaust leak and developed an intermittent misfire at part throttle. Didn't want to row too far and had no tools with me so just chucked it back on the trailer. Will sort out that exhaust leak, check all the leads and then try again.

Action shot. There's a boat in there....honest.

Action shot.