Hey guys,
It’s been about two months since my last post so I’m giving you an update on where I stand. You might want to grab another of your favorite adult beverages while I finish this up.
As you recall, I was in the process of cleaning up the hull. That was certainly a lot more work than I anticipated. I also had put about 10 hrs. on the motor and it was running incredibly well. My only issue was I ended up having an oil leak from the rear of the motor someplace. I figured either a RMS or the oil pan gasket. Either way, I couldn’t let it go like that so my only option was to pull the motor again and see what was going on.
Up until now during this whole project, I didn’t really have any timelines to worry about. If I ran into a snag or that “snowball effect” jumped up and bit me, it wasn’t a big deal. If it pushed out the completion an extra month or two, so be it. Remember, I was working two jobs and splitting my little free time between the family, friends, grandbabies and the boat. Not having a boat to use wasn’t an issue either because my ski partner has an awesome ’80 CC that I had at my disposal so it’s not like I was loosing any water time. Well sorta (just another addition to the “free time” list).
Well, I quit my second job the end of Jan. so I could try and finish this thing. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel now and it was certainly a really good feeling.
Earlier on in this thread I said that I had always been very active with CCFan. I met my ski partner through that website as well as numerous others that I now consider very good friends. I had posted on that website about my project just as I have here and several of the members couldn’t wait to see the end result. They have an annual reunion every year (one of several throughout the country now) in March about an hour from Orlando on the St. John’s river. I had been to it for three years now. I thought I would stir things up a little bit and take my boat to the reunion. Imagine that…..an A/S at a CC reunion! There were a lot of guys who couldn’t wait to see it, drive it and ski it. I just needed to do my part.
So now for the first time in three years I was under a definite deadline to finish it up. I couldn’t push it out any longer but there was also another little issue ( that “snowball effect” again). During this same time, as is the case if you live in FL after spending your whole life in WI, you get visitors. Well we had visitors. Lots of them. We had a five week run when my wife and I had the house to ourselves for one night. I was working during the day, entertaining our visitors at night and then getting up anywhere between 1AM and 3AM to work on the boat for a few hours before I had to go to work again. I ran on 3-4 hrs. sleep a night for about six weeks. The reunion was March 23-25 and the clock was ticking.
This is what it looked like with three weeks left. Of course, it didn’t help any that the engine needed to be pulled a second time?!?!?!
I found out the oil leak was the pan gasket. I had put sealer on the corners of the gasket (where the half-round crank opening meets the flat pan flange) just like all my documentation told me to do. It turns out that the whole half round crank opening at each end needs to have a thin bead around it.
I also ended up going over the sides of the hull twice. After I was done with the wetsanding, buffing and polishing and you got it out in the sun, you could see immediately that I didn’t do a good enough job on each stage of the sanding to make the scratches small enough for the buffer and rubbing compound to remove them. Compared to the top deck and dashboard, the sides of the hull looked like crap so I basically had to start over again. That really sucked!
The week that the reunion was scheduled for I was still in the process of finishing things up but it was definitely coming together. It was gonna be close so I took off the last two days before we were leaving and I put 17 hrs in one day and 18 hrs. the last day when I added the new registration numbers ending this whole ordeal.
Finally….it was done.
This was right after my daughter and I got back from a quick slalom set before getting it cleaned up.
I ended up having to replace every light assembly on the trailer which could also use some minor attention to clean up the whole package but I'm going to use it for a while now. The trailer can wait for now. I'm tired and just want to play.
So what was it like to take an A/S to a CC reunion? Nothing short of phenomenal. There were about 35 boats there from as far away as MA, NY and PA. All were CC except mine and to say it got a lot of attention is an understatement. The engine cover was open almost as much as it was closed and I think there are several CC owners who have a new found respect for American Skiers.
Art Cozier, who is a very well respected CC employee for several decades (I believe that Art helped to design several different CC’s or some aspect of most of them at one point in time or another over the years but Ron probably knows better than myself) saw me drive into the reunion site. As soon as he saw the dual exhaust inboard of the stringers and the tapered hull at the transom he immediately knew it was an A/S. I spent a long time talking with Art who knows Ken Elkind very well and has regular conversations with him to this day. Art couldn’t say enough really good things about Ken and the quality of the A/S boats even directly compared to CC. A true gentleman by every sense of the word. By the way, Art owns and drives one of the very first true Ski Nautiques that the company introduced in 1961. What an incredible piece of history that is and a totally cool boat besides.
There was another gentleman who has owned several different CC’s over a 40 year span and I saw him spend several hours going over every aspect of my boat over the course of the weekend. Just before dinner on Saturday night he approached me and said that without question, it was classiest boat of the event. How awesome is that?
And how about performance? I’m now in the process of doing some prop testing to find the right wheel for this thing. I’m working with Eric Johnson at OJ who sent me a three blade 13x12.5 CNC XMP and a four blade 13x14 Force. We’re playing with them now to see what performs best and if we need to go with other pitches, we’ll certainly do that. We needed some sort of baseline to see where we were at. I also had a friend from the reunion bring me a three blade Acme CNC 13x12 that he had laying around from one of his project boats to try and see what it does. It’ll be interesting to see the difference between the OJ and Acme props even though they are slightly different pitched.
At this point the stock Federal 13x12 I had rebuilt and repitched to 13x13 is turning 5800 RPM @ 55 MPH on the GPS. The three blade OJ is turning 5900 RPM @ 52 MPH and the four blade is turning 5700 RPM @ 53 MPH. Those OJ figures were without any cup. I shipped them back to OJ and have now received them back cupped but I haven’t had a chance to try them or the Acme yet.
I want to get the RPM’s down to 54 or 5500. I personally think the boat will do better than 55 MPH with the right prop and still keep the holeshot, which at this point is phenomenal. Purely my best guess estimate right now would be a three blade CNC 13x13 or even a 13x14 but the four blade certainly has excellent potential. We’ll see when everything is done. I’ll definitely keep you updated on that aspect.
So I’m now pretty much done with this bad boy. That is until I save up enough to replace the upholstery and maybe I’ll be able to get some original looking decals at some point. I have to admit though that the more I stare at it (which is an awful lot), the more I kinda like the old girl all nuded up. Clean and classy. If long time, hard core CC owners can see her that way, why shouldn’t everybody? Just because it doesn’t say American Skier doesn’t mean it’s not an American Skier.
Just sayin’.
