British Anzani Twin Block C and D Alkys coming to BRF

[John (Taylor) Gabrowski]

From fables and myths to realities again.

From 1961 to 1964 and later again in 1968, these 2 different period built and 2 different in class, twin coupled block British Anzani engines existed in the boat racing scenes. From 1961-1964 a Anzani coupled twin blocked C (combined 250cc X2 = 30 cubic inches) produced by Bill Tenney and raced in Class C Alky Runabout in the USA proved to be the success it was but all admit it was very hard on its components.

In 1968 out of the Northwest USA region 10, Jim Hallum and Ron Anderson embarked on a similar project but used 2 larger Anzani engines (322cc x2 = 40 cubic inches) twinned and coupled to produce the class D Alky Anzani. There was so much horsepower here (reputed to be 200+ horsepower) that component failures time after time eventually ended the project. The engine was still a racing reality.

The 1961 to 1964 period British Anzani coupled twin blocked class C Alky as of Christmas 2006 has been re-created and is hoped will be test fired to run, only for historical and display purposes in the spring/summer of 2008.

The 1968 British Anzani coupled twin blocked class D Alky is under recreation this fall of 2007 with similar hopes that it will be finished and ready for test firing to run for historical and display purposes in the spring/summer of 2008.

Both engines with pictorials and their stories will be submitted here to BRF as historical projects in outboard racing.

[smittythewelder]

Glad to see you posting Anzani stuff again, John!

As for the "D" Anzani that was assembled here, its troubles had little to do with horsepower output and more to do with fouling plugs when trying to plane-off a heavy runabout with cold heat-range plugs (Autolite 203 or 403) and some percentage of nitro while using the inadequate Lucas mags of the time (1968). This was a very short-term project, and was soon dismantled. Since I had the experience of having to lift the back of Chuck Walters' runabout with that engine and Honker's large bod, I'll speculate that nobody wanted to lift it anymore! Had it run, total horsepower wouldn't have been much over 120-125, which however would still have been very respectable at the time. We heard lots of amazing horsepower figures from other sources, but Anzanis still held almost all of the A and B records in the Sixties. With upgraded ignitions they became surprisingly reliable, but by that point Anderson's A Konig and Hallum/Walin's VB Konig had superceded the Anzanis.

[John (Taylor) Gabrowski]

I can remember as an early teenager and pitman then in the earlier 1960s there was no love for Lucas magnetos with Anzani owner/drivers then. Its seemed the most common three items that happened then was the Lucas magneto crapped out fowling the plugs, the crank somehow twisted ( I didn't know they were piece together cranks way back then) and water came up the bottom pipe when the driver got off plane flooding the bottom cylinder with water preventing the engine from restarting for its next heat. In one situation in Selkirk the water up the bottom pipe hydralic'd the engine block cracking it. The A and B Alky classes were just dominated by those engines and their crescent shaped stacks. All these engines from A to F always had people on their feet and we here are talking thousands of spectators in the 1960s.

My first Anzani I bought in the late 1970s had the Autolite sparkplugs in it too and spares too boot. It was not the Champion L-10s I read and heard about either. I never knew "automotive" sparkplug makers like Autolite made sparkplugs for outboard racing. I was in shock when "AC" sparkplugs showed up too! We were very much Champion Sparkplug users and fans here with our trusty J4Js and new found UJ7Gs etc slapped into our racing Merc stockers then. What Alkys had we had no clue, so we assumed it was all Champion Sparkplugs too and there were plenty of boats decalling that fact.

It was always part of the show here to have the pits not far from the spectator area and watching the Anzani starts was really part of that show. The lift, the revup that was amazingly fast and the throw forward as opposed to drop with everone rearward getting hosed from props biting as they took off. They were on plane so fast, if everything was alright. If the engine even hiccuped wrong the boat would stay put with everyone ganging up on it cooperatively to get it to run ASAP soon.

Where some of these horsepower estimates came from were from Bill Tenney's own engineers. One has retired from Polaris Snowmo and lives in Thief River Falls, Minn. He still has his Anzani engine and his recollection is from some of the B Alky engines they dynoed where at some 40% nitro the horsepower on the Bs exceeded 400+ horsepower per liter of displacement. He also had some recollection of what was going on in the North West in Region 10 where some were going as high as 60% nitromethane fuel mix and he wondered out loud how the engines could stay together with the kind of horsepower that would generate?? One of his funny comments was "over here we use DelOrto fuel bowls held high" "over there (Region 10) they use fuel pumps!"

I can appreciate the reason why no one wanted to lift Chuck Walters monster engined runabout. Tim Chance has quite the story about the 1961 to 1964 effort with the twin C. Sure there was four guys that held that engine and boat up too but only one man in particular of some 350 lbs of muscle started that motor all the time. He passed away some 6 years ago wondering what ever happened to that motor he alone could start. I am sure he knows now its back together.

[mac19f]

Why do the British drink warm beer??....they have Lucas refrigerators.

[Mark75H]

Why aren't the English known for making computers & cell phones?

They haven't figured out how to make them leak oil

[John (Taylor) Gabrowski]

In going through some parts selections had to be made. When looking at these 2 Anzani piston rods, it leaves one scratching your head if this was gradual nitomethane fuels bending this piston/conencting rod or some kind of dumping that hydralic'd the rod when water came storming into the engine through some opening? When an Anzani 350 exploded upon starting back around 1979 at an Alberta race, when they used pure nitro to start it, both rods snapped off roughly in their middles as the engine grenaded. To see this one bend, why did it without breaking?

[John (Taylor) Gabrowski]

When you start looking at selecting components for the basis of a mythical twin blocked outboard racing engine you only heard rumors about when you were a teenager standing in the water as a pitman it comes to be a real daunting task. When I took this picture back in the late 1990s, some of it made some sense putting an engine coupler on top of a steel pipe type fabricated/welded tower with Mercury clamps because it was all very heavy duty. At the time Tim Chance was not around racing or posting on the Internet to tell me it was the right direction but not the right combination of components for the coupled twin Anzani Alky class C of 1961 to 1964. Similarly Smitty the Welder dropping the bombshell recently that in 1968 there was the Hallum and Anderson effort to build a twin coupled Anzani class D Alky was doubly whammy! Both Tim Chance and Smitty years apart and locations just as spread out were both lifting a class C or D different Alky racing runabouts with coupled twin Anzanis powering them. It is very plain to see that they must have been that heavy because the picture clearly shows (see the surface rust?) the basis for these engines were 2 cast iron (not sleeved aluminum) loop scavenged engine blocks. Real heavy!

[smittythewelder]

While the Anzani gurus here ran Autolite AE203 and 403s (as I recall they thought there were fewer "duds" per box, or something like that), the comparable Champions were L82R and L84R. I think some of the Quincy owners used ACs, but don't know the ranges. And the stock guys found a wider variety yet. Dan Mackle, BSH points champ in '65, used Lodge plugs from England.

Some of the earlier magntos and batery-and-points ignitions systems were so inadequate at firing a wet charge of methanol on a cloudy Northwest day, and the cooling of those motors was so marginal, that tuners were faced with a balancing act: Do you run 203s so that you don't stick a piston, or 403s so that you don't foul a plug before the boat gets on plane? This was especially acute at the competition records course at Yelm every September, which was invariably rainy and cold. Hallum and Anderson equipped the Anzanis with cockpit-adjustable mixture controls so that the driver could lean out the Vacturi while trying to plane-off with his long-course, high-pitch prop, then richen it up once he got going. This made it easier to use the 203s; even so, I think they were trying combinations of a 203 in one cylinder and a 403 in the other. Electronic ignitions such as the Delta Mark 4 and Kiekhaefer's unit were a huge advance.

[John (Taylor) Gabrowski]

You got to a race and it gets to be pretty pursausive when a Champion Sparkplugs representative hands you a whole box of your most used sparkplugs, for me they were J4Js for the KG9s, the 40Hs and then the 20Hs, 30Hs and 55Hs back then along with a decal for each side of your boats cockpit, on all your boats! They were always sociable and always handing out these freebees. Seemed that there were no better alternatives then, until Champion came up with the platinum small tip plugs that were even better yet in a fair bunch of heat ranges to boot. The thought of Autolite, A/C, Splitfires and Spitfires was sacraledge until some NGKs came up when Champion went to copper plus giving NGK a bunch of converts as a result.

I noticed that Alky plugs for a lot of methanol burners, like Quincy, Konig, Yamato and Crescent used L82s or L84s and there were L83s too but they were not that well favored though in between.

That leaned out start and richen device, Hallum and Anderson developed was essentially a driver adjusted cable feeding into a carb mounted slider rack and the pinion device being the rotatable high speed needle (they put a small gear on it) all mounted atop the Vacturi carb was not only good but it seemed quite necessary as the raceboats got faster and longer. That was very much a North West USA device not found out east. Way back when drivers 50s and 60s (especially runabouts) Anzanis would start out lean and the driver turn around, reach back and adjusted the high speed to rich once planed out which was one mean feat. In other cases they would hold the raceboat up until the Anzani rev'd up cleaned out and then a pitman would turn the high speed needle to rich, then they would throw the boat forward as usual to launch.

I never knew what the inside of a Lucas magneto was like but if it was anything like the Brit bikes I tooled with in hgih school or the British sports cars I was hung up on early in my driving a car years, I had a feeling it was not going to be great because those others proved that. The Lucas magneto once opened looked pretty awful (over complicated) and they looked like Fairbanks Morse wannabees that just couldn't make it. One immediate improvement to the Lucas magneto was to install (it drops right in including securing points in the coils frame) a Fairbanks Morse magneto coil (same as KF9, KG9 & 40H) in it with an immediate improvement in voltage discharge making starting easier though the rest of the magneto was generally still pretty crappy.

[Tim Chance]

I'm going to go on a Mission and find a photograph of Floyd Harris running the twin block Anzani (Yes it is British) C on his 13' DeSilva Runabout, US-1 and/or G-33, and hopefully a photo of Jim Kolosky cranking it.