Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Biggest gas engine I've ever heard of for a speedboat?

A six cylinder Riotte 4 stroke gas engine producing 110 hp out of a massive 3016 cu in!

It weighed 3200 lb, and was installed in a 60 foot speedboat in 1902


That's almost twice as big as the 1730 cu in Beast of Turin, and it's more than twice the size of the Maybach aero engine from a Gotha bomber, that was only 1,409 cu. in.


http://progress-is-fine.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-yacht-standard-1902.html
https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2011/01/people-wonder-what-largest-displacement.html

13 comments:

  1. It's quite a few after the time this was built (about 40+ years) but I think the old wooden speed boats with the Rolls Royce V12 Merlin engines used gasoline

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    1. ok. The RR Merlin was only 1650 Cu in. A bit smaller than the Beast of Turin at 1730, and about 1/2 the size of this Riotte

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  2. Ain't no getting around it, the Riotte is a beast. I can only imagine the combined weight of the boat and motor combined

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    1. it says at the link that the engine was 3200 pounds, the boat was 1500, together 4700 pounds

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  3. Post WW1 cheap and plentiful Liberty V12's were converted into marine engines, and got a lot of use for bootlegging in the 20's. In the 30's Packard developed its own V12 marine engine used to set records by Gar Wood, but this was not a derivative of the Liberty, and was pre Merlin as well. Post WW2 a lot of V12 aero engines were cheap and plentiful as well, I only know of Allison V1710's used as Marine engines, but I'm sure the Merlin's were as well.

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    1. right, I've been aware of that, and covered them, but this post was about a 3016 cu in engine.

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    2. Yeah, sorry got off on a tangent there. This is about ten years before the Disturber IV racing boat which was built to win the Harmsworth Trophy. It had two Duesenberg in line 12's each with a displacement of 3,221 cu in (52.8 L).

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    3. Wow, two inlines... that means they were still seperate then? And so, though together they had a total cu in larger, this Riotte I've never heard of was a single unit with more than any other engine I've ever heard of. It might be dwarfed by the 8 engine drag tractors that pull the weighted sled for all I know, but, it's a single engine mass larger than anything I've ever heard of in vehicles, that isn't a commercial engine for supertankers, etc

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    4. Yes, two separate inline 12's. Fred and Augie Duesenberg built the engines at the request of Commodore James A. Pugh who was going to race the Disturber IV. Each engine was over 10-feet long and was comprised of six two-cylinder blocks mounted on a one-piece crankcase. The crankcase was one of the largest aluminum forgings made at the time and weighed 365 lb before the final machine work.

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    5. one word, wow

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    6. Yeah, it did set a speed record but never did get to compete in the Harmsworth Trophy.

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  4. If you calculate an engine with a bore of 8" and a stroke of 10" it comes to just over 3000 cid. American LaFrance did a pumping engine with those dimensions. If I could find my 1914 Floyd Clymer catalog I could tell model number. Maybe someone else has one handy.

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    1. I'm confused... the engine, that powered the pump was 3k cu in? Or, the pump was 3000 cu in, in which case I ask, when water pumps are rated by cfm, you must have meant the stationary engine that drove a water pump?

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