
You join us now having previously been on "Boats and Seagulls" thread and not quite in the right section of SOS.
Bruce, perhaps you could elaborate on your idea with reed valves. Do you have any pictures that might help explain how this could be done.
Nudge, i know you are a bit of a metal pourer on the quiet. I admire that. If this project were ever to be undertaken by an enthusiast in their shed or garage at home, leaving bespoke casting aside for the moment, i feel that the average joe working on their gull will probably have a limited set of hand tools with which to work and casting something for a specific task to most seems quite a scary thing to do. So with that in mind perhaps we could come back to the idea a bit later once we've gathered some sound ideas before we move to another level.
I would like to know though if you've ever recorded any data from your own 102/boat set up that maybe i could use as a ballpark comparison with some of my own 102's. Engine revs and speed etc. for working out a bespoke "tune pipe" will help me quite a bit, but as i only have my own 102's to work from and a big heavy boat which doesn't really compare that well with what we're discussing here i would like a wider spread of numbers from which i can compare.
For simplicity's sake here, i think many folks would be keen to discover just how far we can safely push the bone stock components that are already inside a typical 102 gull, sensibly upgrade a few bits and see what happens. If needs be, as we get further into this and there just happens to be someone with a 102 and a suitable boat handy maybe we could put some of these ideas into practice and carry out some gentle testing on the water.
Again for simplicity's sake and without using any expensive high tech equipment like dyno's etc. if we try to keep things at a grass root level as far as measuring devices go e.g a cheap tacho for measuring engine speed, for measuring speed through the water i think most of us have a good mobile phone these days with an app that has a gps device built in. They seem relatively accurate to me and readily available to most. Maybe some ideas about a basic set of tools would be good and spanner sizes to those might still be confused with it, particularly some of the newbies that might be interested.
Mr. Naughtybits (is it Jason, i can't remember?)
I'm not at all clued up with the later QB models, but i do understand that they are different internally to a stock 102, so perhaps you could expand on this as well so that we're all aware of what the development actually lead to in these later seagull models.
If we can pool all our ideas into one place, the next logical step would be someone to actually build/modify the stock parts and go testing.
I've already mentioned i'm looking into "tune pipes" so i don't mind building a bespoke expansion pipe for testing purposes if everybody else doesn't mind that is.
Jon