Old Looper Pipes

[J-Dub]

I did Gene, until learned that the fuel pumps won't maintain sufficient fuel supply at 9500 sustained RPM... On my first attempt we entered the "Traps" at 96 mph and accelerating until the engine went lean... Put the Konny on and averaged 95.5 mph.

[champ20B]

Personally I don't believe that you actually know what you are talking about. The A & B's were extremely strong & fast. I won the B championship in 1968 against the almost new 4 cylinder Konigs. Gerry Waldman was winning the A class in to the 70's although I should have beat him with my FA Konig in 1969 but he was just as fast & maybe even faster in to the early 70's.

I never said it wasn't fast or successful. I was just giving an honest and intelligent critique of what I see based on my abilities which by the way, have and still serve me very well without a doubt. Ron Hill mentioned that a particular Quincy "A" was as fast as another racers Looper "B".... So Im wrong for thinking that taking away exhaust heat exposure between cylinders and against piston skirts wouldn't have made it faster than it already was regardless I suppose.

Ill just leave it alone as a exclusive discussion. Have a good Thanks-Giving everybody!

[Steve Litzell]

Who are you calling old, Steve?

Talk louder, I can't hear you!

Let me turn up my hearing aid. I stood to close to too many Loopers.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my boat racing buddies and their families!

Talking to all my old Loop Buddies! Looper service has helped me out around the house when the MRS speaks Steve Oh JDub, give me a call you want 60 ci or 66 ci????

[J-Dub]

Steve, Why would you ask such a dumb question??? I really expected more from you... I will type this out for you reeeeal slow so you can keep up. SIXTY SIX! 66, 2 9/16", 2.5625".
Si?

J-Dub

[Gene East]

J-Dub

Cut him some slack. He's old!

Oops; my bad, he's younger than me.

[BJuby]

Oh boy! Are we ganging up on Steve? I should join considering the bad news he gave me today.

[smittythewelder]

Fascinating to see that prototype!!

Champ, understand that they very well might have later added material to that experimental block in the photo to aim the exhaust ports out and away from each other, because this was done on the early-version production engines, probably including John Myers' #1 A motor (we need that photo!). On a later version, the ones with the wide-swept pipe elbows, the early exhaust "separator" was extended beyond the block and several inches into the elbow, whereas the early-version separator stopped maybe 3/8" in from the edge of the port. O.F. Christner was out in Seattle one year when the APBA national meeting was held here, and I asked him about the new, very long exhaust splitter and the new wide-swept elbows as versus the previous set-up. He told me that you could modify a first-version block by extending the splitter by the 3/8" out to the edge of the port, and get most of the power improvement even if you kept the old elbows.

I'm pretty sure it was 1966, my second year of racing, that John Myers and then his dad Bill started running their first A and B loopers. The B versions looked like all the early-version loopers everybody has seen, but the first A's had much skinnier, smaller-angle megaphones plugged into the elbows. But I don't remember ever seeing those welded elbows; what a find, J Dub!!

As to early loopers vs. other motors, I doubt that many Anzanis other than the ones that had been heavily developed by Hallum and Anderson would be any more than more-or-less even competition, even in the earliest years of loopers. I saw a lot of this, and I know that by maybe 1969, John Myers had an early-version A Loop that was very fast, and no ordinary Konig and certainly no ordinary Anzani would have kept up with it. I'd love to see J Dub built THAT engine, put it on a period-correct hydro, and run a few laps at an SOA race; that engine sang a sweet song!!

[Steve Litzell]

Oh boy! Are we ganging up on Steve? I should join considering the bad news he gave me today.

Go Ahead, I've got big shoulders, And Gene and I go back awhile so he gets a pass, J Dub...... Well he just needs to learn to respect his elders or I will sic Fuchslin on him

[Gene East]

Smitty,

Thanks for joining in on the Looper vs Konig/Anzani debate. No one can deny there were a select few Anzanis that were very fast.

The gentlemen responsible for those engines deserve a lot of credit. I certainly respect their accomplishments. But as you said these were not the typical Anzanis.

Had I been the first to make that statement, it would have sounded like sour grapes. Thank you for saying it for me.

[smittythewelder]

As many have observed, everybody's dyno seems to read different, or at least people are interpreting things differently (if not, uh, exaggerating). Still, if you remember them, Gene, or if Frank Volker does, I'd be interested to see a series of horsepower-at-rpm figures for the various Quincy motors, by version. For one thing, you could dismiss Champ's incorrect idea (assuming I have this right, Champ) that the first version loopers of around 1966 were not much faster at that early stage of development than the cross-flow Mercs and Hot Rods were at what was then their well-developed stage. So if you recall, Gene, what were the figures for the deflector engines by that point, and what were the figures for the first version loopers that were sold in big numbers? And if you know the figures for the next stage of looper development, the ones with the wide-swept pipes, that would also be interesting.

Champ, you are certainly right that if that first crude prototype block had gone into production as we see it in the photo and with no modification, the exhaust arrangement would have been sub-optimal for sure. But I'm pretty sure that by the time Quincy was shipping the first loopers, they had separated the exhaust streams of the upper and lower cylinders on both sides in the block. The porting was different from the prototype, too (that really is an interesting photo!). Subject to J Dub posting a photo of A Loop #1, which I saw on the water many times but never saw in pieces, my guess is that it looks like the rest of the production run.

Champ, let me also say that when I disagree with your idea that in those early looper years a good deflector could almost keep up, I'm not jumping to defend the reputation or feelings of the Christner family, Gene East, Frank Volker, or anybody who owned loopers. I never owned one back then (have three now), and with my early, skinny-pipe Konig I beat John Myers and was beat by him. None of what I say is about protecting anybody's ego, and I hope it doesn't bother you either, Champ, because you always have interesting observations here and on the other site.

In the first couple of years of the first version loopers (talking class A and B here) I got to see several of them and their competitors here in Reg. 10. There were A and B Hubbell and Quincy Mercurys, some FA Konigs with the early skinny expansion chambers, two or three FB Konigs, a few single-carb Anzanis (all A's, IIRC), the faster A and B Anzanis of Hallum and Anderson, two 2-carb B Harrisons, and a couple of Hot Rods. Oh, and I can't forget Bill Myers deflector B Konig, which he ran for a year while John ran the loopers (I have this motor now, and am trying to get J Dub to offer me some absurdly large sum for it for sentimental reasons, but so far he has just yawned).

Now, to compare apples to apples you have to specify that any of the engine types under comparison have to be properly clearanced and assembled, in good tune and running cleanly, and on comparable boats, with similarly good props (and we probably ought to add a condition of warm weather for decent vaporization of the fuel). This was not so easy to do, especially in those days of marginal ignitions. The best ignitions seemed to me to be the heavy Phelon flywheel magneto from the B Stock Mercs, and the somewhat rare, similarly heavy energy-transfer magneto on a few 2 cylinder Konigs. The other mags (Bosch, Sem, and especially Lucas) were less happy for various reasons (not always electrical), and the battery-and-points ignitions were also inadequate. The only big race I ever went out-of-region for was the '68 NOA Nationals at Forest Lake, MN. If Gene remembers that one, it might not be with great pleasure. It was, I'd say, the biggest year for loopers, and there must have been (wild guess) eighty 2-cylinder loopers at that race. And a good seventy of them, with the battery and points, had an ignition miss, just pop-pop-pop every day, all day, about drove me nuts. Of course, very quickly thereafter, the new "transistorized" aftermarket ignitions for cars were widely applied to our outboards to good effect.

So you have to compare a good-running this to a good-running that. With that caveat, Champ, cross-flow Mercs would be doing well to finish within 3/4 of a lap of the early-version loopers (BTW, I never heard the term "flathead" applied to that motor until much later; looper was the Reg. 10 term for them). Same thing with Hot Rods. Stu Lowe, an airline pilot and older brother of Jeff Lowe who was nationally one of the very fastest BSH drivers of the day, had a B Hot Rod built by John Alden in California, meaning it was as good an alky-conversion as you'd find anywhere. Stu Lowe's Hot Rod always ran well, but he wasn't going to beat a B loop or even an A loop that was running right. Most of the non-Hallum Anzanis wouldn't run well long enough to be any threat (a Lucas mag that if it worked at all would tend to shear off the teeth of its drive gear, bad big-end bearings, wimpy gears).

NONE of those engines, as fondly as the old guys remember them, could remotely hope to stay on the same lap with a modern Italian engine, even with modern props and featherlight boats. The ports were all tiny and not well-aimed. They sure were cool in their day, though. The sport owes a huge debt to the Quincy Welding team for turning out a design that let the little guy build a fast motor very inexpensively using a lot of Mercury components he already had, ending up with a simple user-friendly, mechanic-friendly racemotor with a one-piece crankshaft that would run with or beat the more complicated engines from overseas. If you saw your good old deflector equipment made obsolete at a stroke, and had to buy the latest new thing just to keep up, it sure helped that the new thing was relatively cheap, and as easy to work on as racing equipment ever gets.

Thanks, Quincy!!!