1955 Boat Sport magazine article

[smittythewelder]

Google tells me that European motorcycle racers were far ahead of outboards with exhaust tuning. Norton used a megaphone in 1934. Dieter Koenig put megaphones on an alky engine in 1957 ( maybe 1956 ). I think Koenigs were still deflectors at this time Smitty. Erick Wolf put expansion chambers on a DKW in 1951 or 52. Outboards didn't have expansion chambers for another decade.

Rumley, I've not seen a photo of the B/C deflector Konigs with anything other than open exhausts, no pipes. The exhaust flanges were drilled and tapped, but I'm guessing that was to hold the manifold used with the Stock-configured engines. Probably there were owners here who did make themselves a megaphone set-up at some point. But I don't think the Konig deflectors got used for very many years, not like the alky Mercs. There's another Boat Sport article from about 1957 telling all about the B/C deflector motors, and toward the end it mentioned that the 3-cylinder C motor was shortly to be replaced by a 2-cylinder model. This had to be the loop-scavenged FC, and maybe at the same time the FB engine which used many of the same or very similar parts replaced the deflector B. In 1957, Konig already had a looper A engine, which I think was also his first engine with megaphones.

Have you ever seen the insides of a deflector Konig? The air/fuel makes its way from the crankcase to the combustion chamber through windows in the piston skirt (Anzani did this as well). Might help cool the piston, but it looks pretty restrictive to my eye, and I wonder how well it could flow compared to the Mercury side-transfer passage. No easy way to make direct comparisons, I guess, because the bore/stroke combinations were different between Konigs and Mercs.

As you say, roadracing motorcycle engine technology was, so far as I can tell, a generation or two ahead of even purpose-built racing outboards at every point (at least until now), though occasionally our side had something pretty slick, such as Konig's disc rotary valves and slider pipes. And though it might not quite have been 2-stroke state-of-the-art even when new (I'm trying to remember details of the Suzuki X-6 and the 250cc Yamahas of that moment), the Quincy flathead still is amazing for the clever way Christner worked around the limitations (bore spacing) of the Mercury crankshaft, which meant that racers could recycle a bunch of their Merc parts and go real fast, real cheap!! And they were easy to work on in a home shop; incredible!!

Gene, for you I will happily use any spelling of any word, just to keep you talking, LOL!! I did see that ad for the Quincy throttle, but don't think I ever saw one out here. Leonard Keller was building all the hardware in his little north Seattle shop. He was a very good guy, one of many such that made any new kid feel welcome.

[Gene East]

Keller made good products. They were good competition!

I think the original Quincy throttle sold for $7.50. They were around $50.00 when I left QW. Art Neadeck and Ron Hill make/made copies of the Quincy throttle.

Don't know if they are still available or what the cost might be.

Re: Quincy exhaust manifolds for "Green-tankers". A lot of these were sold to racers and pleasure boaters as well.

My first racing boat was a Pabst runabout with a KG-7.
It had one of these manifolds until the guys at QW gave me a broken set of pipes which I repaired in high school shop class.

My Dad was deputy marshal in our home town of La Grange, MO. (10 miles up the Mississippi from Quincy)

One day he received a call from an irate lady insisting he arrest those boys making all that noise on the river.

Dad explained to her in detail why he couldn't do that.

#1 "I don't have jurisdiction on the river!"

#2 "My boat isn't fast enough to catch them!"

#3 " One of those boys is my son"!

Some times it pays to have "contacts".

Gene

[Original Looper 1]

This is the most original unrestored Quincy Merc that I have seen in the last 40 years !

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mercury-Mark...RXJnYM&vxp=mtr

Regards
Paul.

[Gene East]

Thanks Paul,

That is a SWEEEEEEEEEET 20-H and it shows a very clear image of the exhaust manifold we've been talking about. Also someone spent a lot of time polishing the Quincy gravity fuel tank.

People may wonder why use a gravity tank when the 20-H came from Mercury with a fuel pump. One of the reasons is: The 20-H came from Mercury with a fuel pump! Huh??? What did I just say???

True, the 20-H did have a fuel pump and it worked very well, ON GASOLINE! The check valves were rubber and alcohol would cause the check valves to swell up and make the fuel pump unreliable.

For our readers, Paul was a young teenager at this time and was not really involved with the racing aspects of his Dad's business. Thankfully that changed!

Charlie Strang and his engineers at Mercury came up with neoprene check valves. Problem solved!

Charlie Strang could see the value of racing to Mercury.

Carl Kiekhaefer could not! He was very offended that the first thing a racer did was discard the cowlings on what he viewed as "His Motors" plus he believed, "His Motors" ran just fine right out of Fond du Lac. Mr. K cancelled QW's Mercury dealership virtually cutting off QW's parts supply.

Charlie went to bat for QW pointing out that we were providing valuable R&D for Mercury at very low cost. Quincy Welding was reinstated as a Mercury dealership.

Quincy Welding made one concession. What had once been called "Quincy-Merc" was hence forth known as "Merc-Quincy"! I'm convinced he simply wanted top billing.

I respect Mr. K for what he was able to accomplish in his lifetime, but I didn't like him! He came to Quincy and Mr. Christner (Chris) was escorting him around the shop and introducing him to the crew.

I was "blue printing" a 6 cyl. block on a milling machine. The first words he ever said to me were, "What are you f'ing up today?" Not a good way to win friends and influence people!

If you haven't read his book "Iron Fist" I highly recommend you do so. As he was dying he said, "Tell Charlie I'm sorry"! I believe he owed O.F. Christner an apology as well!

"May he rest in peace"!

[smittythewelder]

Thanks for the link to that string of photos, Paul!! I'd never seen that.

[Gene East]

Smitty,

Was this the first time you were on the Quincy Looper web site? Paul and Diane did a great job, don't you agree?

I promised to talk pipes several days ago. A little diversion called "FISHING" got in the way!

A Church "Brother" has an overstocked bass lake on his farm that needs periodical thinning out. Several of us saw it as our Christian duty to help the Brother out. It was a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it!

Back to the subject at hand, "Pipes"!

The 1958 NOA Championships proved to be a Konig rout in the A & B classes. Konig had megaphones, Quincy did not! The results clearly showed Quincy needed pipes.

I was told Mrs. Christner (Vera) told Chris he needed to "soup" those motors up a little. Paul says she was a bit more direct in what she said!

An added emphasis was placed on developing tuned exhaust for 2 cyl. Mercurys. Chris studied everything he could find regarding tuned exhaust on 2 cycle engines. Of course most of the available info applied to motorcycles. Chris loved motorcycles to begin with. I think he may have bought a bike or two and used them as a tax write off. I don't know that to be a fact, but it sounds more legit than a lot of things others have done

First requirement was a method to separate the impulses. Hence; the filler block seated in body filler to prevent cross leakage.

Standard steel elbows were purchased from a local plumbing supply house.

QW didn't have a shear or rollers, so blanks for the megaphones were sheared at the Knaphiede plant 1 block down the street.
Yes, "That Knaphiede" the leading manufacturer of service truck bodies in the USA! Sometimes when we needed just a few pieces, we were allowed to shear them ourselves. Of course that was before OSHA!

Chris made a hand operated roller to pre-shape the megaphone and he machined a tapered mandrel to finish the taper. This resulted in a megaphone with a small point on the end. At first this was trimmed with hand shears so the pipe could stand straight when stood on end, This was discontinued when no impact was noticed.

QW had no dyno at the time; so all effective testing had to be done on the boat and it gets extremely cold in Quincy after the leaves turn color. The boat tests showed a considerable increase in speed and racing in Florida in early 1959 showed QW back on top again.

Eventually, QW made pipes for all Mercurys up to the 90 ci. 6 bangers. QW also made some of the Mercury Factory pipes use in tunnel boat racing!

You asked about the 2-into-1 elbows,(we called them converging).

Chris conceived the idea and he and I set out to build a proto-type. It was gawd awful big and ugly until Al Herrmann reminded us we were not putting twice as MUCH exhaust in the pipe, we were simply putting it in TWICE as fast. We went back to the original pipe and we were happy with the results. I worked for QW from April 1961 to May of 1972. I built nearly all of the pipes built during the '62-'72 period. We made pipes for a lot of motors other than Mercurys. In fact I think I made the first set of converging pipe for a 2 cly. C-Konig. Why would we want to do such a thing?

We'll talk about some of your other ??? next time.

Gene

[Gene East]

Smitty,

Have you ever seen a Konig M class motor?

It's half a 2 cyl A!

I know I'm older than you, but this motor reminded me of a song that was popular when I was a young man.

Perhaps you've heard it.

The song was about a "one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater!"

[smittythewelder]

Song by Sheb Wooley, IIRC; came out when I was in sixth grade, a couple of weeks before the Russians launched Sputnik and we kids were warned to get serious about our studies. That was made a little harder for some of us because the first cheap mass-produced transistor radios had come out, about the same time as early rock n' roll. My family didn't have one for another couple of years, but I did have a real crude radio I built from a kit. For the antenna, I attached a wire with an alligator clip to the metal frame of the bed. It only got clear reception on about three stations, but one was top-40, so when I was supposed to have gone to sleep I put in the single earphone (no speaker) and listened to early Elvis and all the others.

Megadittos on Paul's Quincy Welding website, a wonderful historical resource!!

When you come back, please talk a little more about the "siameezed" pipes (converging elbows). Was the initial motivation just to cut the top-heavy weight and complexity? I remember seeing one or two Mk 75s with six individual megaphones. The top pipe pointed straight aft, but by the time you got to the bottom pipe it was pointing down about twenty degrees and near to dragging on the water!! What performance differences did you see with the 2-into-1 vs. the individual pipes? I know the FC Konig guys did like their Quincy replacement exhausts, and Jack Reed used to cream everybody and set a record or two with his.

Gene, I hope you know you aren't the only old guy who goes fishing religiously . . .

[John Schubert T*A*R*T]

Smitty,

You need to come to the Reunion in conjunction with the Depue USTS Nationals. You can talk with Gene, Jim Schoch & many others including Dan Kirts, Billy Seebold Dicky Pond (depending upon health)

[Gene East]

Smitty,

You are right about the "spread" of the pipes, especially the 75-H and the bigger 6 bangers.

The first remedy was to begin with #3 & #4 pointing as straight back as possible and work outwardly (up or down) from that point.

Fix #2: Imagine a vertical line perpendicular with the spark plugs. Tilt #1 pipe 5-10 degrees toward that line. Tilt #2 pipe away from that line. That shortened the span and did not effect performance other than presenting a smaller wind drag.

Later pipes were made with a tapered elbow larger at the outer end using a much shorter megaphone.

These elbows later became the converging (siamese) elbows used in the 2 cyl. per pipe configuration.

More later

Gene

P.S. I repeat John's invitation. I will be there Thursday and Friday. Unfortunately, I have other commitments for Saturday and Sunday.
Hope to see you there!!!