95' Nautique Project ... expanded

It's looking great. Nice work.

Good question Ken - didn't know there was such a monster. I had done very little untaping because much of the main stem was still in its original braided loom. What little I encountered didn't include that section of harness. I'll have to give it another look to see if I can track it down. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if it were missing .... if the boat would even run, that is.

Most of my issues were from the excessive amount of bare (exposed) wires where the PO had bypassed various areas with his own wire - a TON of which were really too short and had to be stretched, so to speak, to reach their destination and a few that had been spliced in with a mile too much wire and simply raveled up and stuffed in a corner. As such there was a fair amount of splicing to lengthen many of those and of course others that were cut down to the appropriate length. Then as you can see I covered all the exposed wires that I could with poly braid and finished with the glued shrink tubes. Naturally I installed all new breakers, relays and hardware after cleaning and painting the ECM bracket.   Sooo much cleaner looking than the jumbled maze that I inherited.

I did end up finding a couple of cropped pics of the old mess, not that you can really see enough to do it justice.

No problem Gary



Injector side @ main



ECM side @ main


Let me know if you need some of the injector plugs

I guess I need to repost now that I've finally located a diagram that shows that mysterious part - the knock sensor control module.   So my question now I suppose is if those two wires are critical to it's function or were they snipped by a tech as part of an update or "fix".   They look as though they've been cut for a while with all the corrosion and dirt, so I'm pretty sure it was like that when I bought the boat, ran her many times and although there were some hick-ups, I didn't feel there was a strong fault anywhere.

Ideas? Thoughts? Comical anecdotes?

One of those little voices in my head says that maybe the timing will get retarded 8 degrees by the computer as if it was knocking.

I don't suppose you know what your base timing was set at last year.

It seems that the boat ran 44 or so mph so wherever the timing was set, it ran OK

Yet another voice says that "Joe won't leave this disconnected" he's been plenty anal so far and it won't change now

gt40KS wrote: But then I found this and the ol' teen hot rodder in me came out and I just had to snatch it up.

For a 351w? Got a part number?

So since the time is rapidly approaching that my engine should be shipping out, I figured I'd better motivate myself to reinstall the previously poorly installed strut and get the rudder back in. Don't remember if I had ever posted pics of the previous, terrible alignment that the MC dealer had done so that will come first. But all is good and perfectly aligned now



It was actually worse than it appears in the photo because the shaft was pressing against the shaft log.   When I was pulling it out, as soon as it cleared the log under the boat it sprung another half inch or so to the side! Honestly .... wouldn't you think there was a problem when you have to bend the shaft to the side just to insert it in the log???        Did I forget to mention they installed the strut with a thimble full of clear silicone as well??







SO CLOSE NOW ....   just need and engine to drop in

For the factory aluminum 351w lower that came only on the Lightnings?

That’s a rare intake...

How about a good clear picture of the bottom of this Lightning manifold ?

Well Gary (and Ken), the bottom of mine are just a bit different from the one you posted, though the top side and runners are likely identical:

Possibly aftermarket? I don't know, but does that circled logo say M&A?
Lets see the whole top side ... maybe more clues

I'm starting to think Joe has some kind of a Frankenstein GT-40. Between the different heads and the later year intake plenum it look's like the PO mixed and matched things.
I thought the intake plenum on the 95's were the individual tube style.

To benefit from the lower manifold pictured above you should track down the individual tube upper like below

Yeah for $600! Not exactly a bargain for half an intake manifold.

Yeah like I said, illusive - at least at any reasonably attainable price    

Anyway, the version I have is one that actually came on many production model PCM's and while I never found out for sure when the change occurred, it appears it was mid-year in 95'. The later PCM bobtails you could buy seam to only have come with the new 'solid cast runner' style as well as later production Nautiques:






As far as the performance goes, I have done a fair amount of research on the subject and while there is a slight performance difference, the key word is slight. Nearly all the articles I combed through agree that the solid cast version performs very close to the full tube and suggest the only time you would really see any real measurable difference is if you were putting a lot more fuel and air into your engine than that of the standard GT build.

Also, the solid cast model is actually an individual tube, not just an open flow. It's just cast together as one presumably to save money on production. The performance difference, they claim, seems to come from what the one article referred to as a 'squish tube' which does limit air flow just a bit over the full round tube style.

TRBenj wrote: Yeah for $600! Not exactly a bargain for half an intake manifold.

I didn’t say they were cheap just available

I put one of these on to see if it would help with all the heat under the cover
https://www.summitracing.com/parts/tfs-51520020