Tech reviews - Poker Runs America

FUEL FOR THOUGHT - VALVTECT'S MARINE FUEL ADDITIVES

If you want to keep your boat’s engines running right, ValvTect’s Marine Fuel additives are a good place to start. You’re a poker-run enthusiast. You trailer around the country, attending the biggest and best events with your high-performance marine machine. To save money, you fill your boat’s fuel tanks at land-based gas stations that only offer ethanol blended gasoline instead of...

PRICE TURNER’S TECH TIPS: DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU – DETERMINING MARINE ELECTRIC FUEL PUMP…

Weldon electric marine fuel pumps have been one of the top choices among the go-fast crowd and high-performance engine manufacturers for decades, providing proven dependability under extreme situations season after season. Perhaps that’s what prompted Mercury Racing to utilize these pumps for supplying fuel to their supercharged electronic fuel-injected engines. Weldon electric marine fuel pumps are water-resistant, but not necessarily water-proof,...

TEAM SIX

Walk the docks at your local poker run and you’ll see everyone gawking at fancy paint jobs or oohing and aahing at the big blowers and the glimmering exhaust pipes. Few people walk around, look at the back of the boat and say, “Sweet Number Sixes.” Despite the fact that Mercury Racing’s Dry Sump Six or the old wet-sump version is...

X MARKS THE SPOT – HOW X-DIMENSION CAN BOOST PERFORMANCE By Steve Sandler

A key factor in boat performance set-up, X-dimension is a measure of the location of a boat’s propeller shaft relative to its bottom. For outdrives with anti-ventilation plates, X-dimension is generally defined as the distance of the anti-ventilation plate above the boat’s bottom. In this case, a greater X-dimension means the prop is shallower in the water. There are other...

PRICE TURNER’S TECH TIPS: CYLINDER REPAIR – EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT VAVLES

A high performance marine engine deserves high performance valves and a high performance valve job. What are high performance valves and what is a high performance valve job? Hang on while we take you there. You may not be doing the job yourself or have the equipment to do so but it is reassuring to know whether or not the...

PRICE TURNER’S TECH TIPS: CRANE’S SHAFT ROCKERS ROCK!

Crane’s Sportsman Series shaft-mount rocker arms are ideal for high performance marine engines. The latest developments in advanced composite materials technology and metallurgy make it possible to eliminate the needle bearings. This is advantageous, because in the process of opening and closing the valves, the needles in traditional roller rocker arms physically roll in one direction as the valve opens,...

CASTING CALL: A LOOK AT HOW A MERCURY PROPELLER IS MADE

It looked like something out of science-fiction movie. Three men clad head-to-toe in extreme heat-resistant clothing were pouring red-hot molten stainless-steel into specially made shells. One wrong move and body parts would bubble and disappear from contact with the searing liquid. Were they making guns, ammunition, martial-arts weapons or something for heavy-duty industrial use? Nope. This was all real. I was...

PRICE TURNER’S TECH TIPS: BATTLING FREEZE UP

Boaters consider fall in the north country, when the leaves are turning and the tourists have gone back to wherever they came from, to be the most enjoyable time of the year on the water and it is. But if you do your boating where the lakes and rivers freeze over in the winter, it's time to think about laying...

Fast Forward - Understanding Turbine Power

Power and headaches sometimes seem to be inter-twined. The more horsepower you tweak out of that giant big-block, the more maintenance and fiddling it seems to require. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, if Howard Murray gets his way, poker runners across North America will be able to go as fast as they please while reducing...

Big Power Straight Out-of-the-Box

At the invitation of Dart Manufacturing’s Jack McInnis, Poker Runs America’s tech department was given the opportunity to test a new set of its marine aluminum heads. These heads were completely stock and out of the box. This was the perfect opportunity, as our technical expert, Price Turner, happened to have a set of engines available that were due for...